LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Srrm — 

Chap. Copyright No.i _*_£_/ 

Shelf 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Christianity 
Supernatural 



A BRIEF ESSAY ON CHRISTIAN 
EVIDENCE 



E'roLjuot 6e del Trpog anoTvoyiav navrl tg) alrovvTi Vjudg Aoyov 
irepl ryg ev vjulv e?i7TL6og^ ju^rd irpavrrjTog koI ^6(iov, — 1 Peter 
ii : 15. 



BY, 

Henry Collin Minion, d. d. 

Professor in San Francisco Theological Seminary 



PHILADELPHIA 

THE WESTMINSTER PRESS 

1900 

v.. 



71419 



X.ibr*u y of Cona^ess 

my c 1900 

Copyrigii* entry 

SECOND COPY. 

Delivered to 

ORDER DIVISION, 
NOV 19 190U 



5^ 



Copyright, 1900, by The Trustees of 
The Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath- 
School Work. 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

When the publishers did the writer the honor 
to request him to prepare a brief treatise on the 
" Evidences of Christianity/^ the request was 
accompanied with the intimation that the manu- 
script asked for was to be one of a number upon 
related topics. In this way it was made proper 
to assume that very much^ which would other- 
wise be embraced in the subject assigned^ Avould 
be treated by other and more competent hands. 
Accordingly, no reference has been made to that 
wide and attractive field of study commonly 
designated as " Natural Theology.'^ Neither has 
the writer cared to invade the province of those 
who are to discuss the questions of biblical criti- 
cism which are so inextricably involved in any 
complete modern apologetic. 

The specific theme of the essay is one of the 
very greatest importance. To evangelical Chris- 
tianity, it is nothing less than the articulus stantis 

3 



4 Author^s Note 

vel cadentis ecdesice. The only sure basis of our 
hope that Christianity will stand is in the faith 
that Christianity is supernatural. 

H. a M. 

San Anselmo, June, 1900. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Introductory, The Call for Evidence . 9 

II. Christianity 25 

III. The '' Claims" of Christianity 35 

IV. The Supernatural- 47 

V. Miracles 61 

VI. The Right of Miracles to Occur .... 83 

VII. The Positive Argument for Miracles . 97 

VIII. Prophecy 113 

IX. Scripture 125 

X. History 141 

XL Christ the Supreme Evidence 155 

5 



There are but two sorts of persons who can be called 
rational ; either those that serve God with all their heart 
because they know him ; or those that seek him with all 
their heart because they do not know him. — Pascal. 

There is small chance of truth at the goal where there is 
not childlike humility at the starting-point. — Coleridge. 

It matters more what a man believes if he is sincere than 
if he is insincere. — Welsh. 

Our estimate of the evidences of any fact necessarily varies 
according to the greater or less antecedent probability which 
we attach to the fact. — Mozley. 

7 



CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY — THE CALL FOR EVIDENCE 

In glancing at some of the elements of Chris- 
tian evidence, there are a few things which we 
do well to have in mind. 

In the first place, it is interesting to note that, 
all along its history, Christianity has been ex- 
pected to prove itself true. Not one of its 
claims has been allowed, without first showing 
that it merited allowance. Error dogs the heels 
of truth as shadow follows substance in a cloud- 
less sun ; and the brighter the sun, the blacker 
the shadow. Christianity has not been assumed 
to be true, simply because it presumes to be good. 
Indeed, the very loftiness of its claims has some- 
times been the occasion of suspicious doubt, and 
again of avowed opposition. It has been said — 
and truly — that the very sacredness of its self- 
alleged character is the measure of a certain 
presumption against Christianity, to be broken 
down before it can be accepted as true ; or, on 
the other hand, it is the measure of its own hypoc- 
risy and of our just contempt, if it so be that 

9 



10 Christianity Supernatural 

Christianity fail to make good what it so boldly 
affirms. 

But it is also interesting to observe that Chris- 
tianity has always cordially conceded the entire 
reasonableness of such a demand. The most 
that it asks for is a fair hearing and a just ver- 
dict. It begs no favors, it wants no franking 
privileges, it shirks or shrinks from no legitimate 
issue. It would count it both injury and insult 
to be tendered the faith of a man who had not 
first carefully examined its right to his faith, or 
to be honored with the homage of men whose 
very homage, by reason of their intellectual in- 
dolence and consequent guilty ignorance, were 
nothing more than an empty and dishonoring 
superstition. 

Christianity challenges investigation. More- 
over, Christianity confidently believes that it 
has in good faith fully and fairly met every such 
test. It points to its history with humble pride. 
It argues that though antecedent presumptions 
were against it at the start, it has now forged its 
way so far into the front, it has now met the 
merciless exactions of the human intellect so 
often, that its eighteen and a half centuries may 
well entitle it to reverse its first attitude and to 
throw the burden of proof on the other side. 
Nearly two millenniums certainly ought to be 
time enough to prove something to the satisfac- 



Introductory 1 1 

tion of all. Old GamalieFs test^ has been pretty 
fairly tried, and whatever else may have been 
proven or not proven, one thing is certain — the 
faith of the apostles has not ^' come to naught/^ 
How long are we to wait before we can take for 
granted the only remaining alternative of the 
venerable rabbi's dilemma, and conclude that 
Christianity is indeed '' of God '^ ? 

It is not only the right, it is the duty of the 
student of Christian evidence, to see to it that no 
violence is done to the proper prerogatives of the 
right reason. Christianity must be willing to 
argue its case on its merits, expecting nothing 
more than an enlightened judge and an impartial 
judgment. The heavenliness of religion, as to 
its origin or as to its character, is no just ground 
on which it is to be given exemption from the 
legitimate tests of all accredited truth. Men are 
not endowed with two kinds of reason, terrestrial 
and celestial, by which they are to pass upon two 
kinds of truth, earthly and heavenly. If God 
made man — and, too, in his own image — then 
God is the author of the laws that regulate man's 
healthy normal action ; and so the processes of 
man's mind are, in their way, an expression of 
God's will. It would be to convict the Creator 
of self-contradiction, if it could be shown that 
1 Acts V : 38, 39. 



12 Christianity Supernatural 

he ever requires his rational creatures to believe 
a single alleged truth except in accordance with 
the laws which he has impressed upon their very 
nature. When a writer speaks of the same thing 
as ^^ logically true and morally false/^^ it should 
not be forgotten that there is a loose cog some- 
where either in the logic, in premise or process, or 
in the morals. To be sure, sin has come in and 
blighted, with its deadly mildew, every faculty 
of man. His intellect is darkened ; his will is 
palsied ; his soul is spiritually dead. As things 
are, man is abnormal : his reason is not always 
right reason; his judgment is warped; he is at 
enmity with holiness and truth. 

Still, man is man yet ; he cannot delegate his 
responsibility to another. Spiritually dead, he 
yet thinks and feels and chooses. His misfortune 
or his fault, or both, the eifect of sin, can by no 
means be argued as an excuse for continuing in 
sin. He must make the best of it. He must 
consider, reflect, reason, conclude, decide, act. 
He may need help from above himself. He does 
need it, and such help is freely tendered on easiest 
conditions. 

Still, the man is himself through it all ; his 
personality is unchanged. His faculties are his 
own ; if they are impaired, they are none the less 

^Dr. Henry Van Dyke's The Oospelfor an Age of Doubtj 
p. 303. 



Introductory 13 

his. The important thing of all to him is, that 
what is left of him, after the terrible shipwreck 
of sin, is his own. The intellect of an archangel 
transcends his own darkened mind immeasurably, 
but then it belongs to the archangel. The rational 
powers of a sanctified soul are far beyond his 
clouded reason, but that clouded reason is all lie 
has. 

Therefore, Christianity must appeal to the rea- 
son that is in man. It may bring with it subjec- 
tive tonics to quicken the impaired faculties of 
the sinner, but it is apart from our thought just 
now to take them into the account. In the whole 
process of saving a sinner from the vice of the 
slums to the heights of glory, his personality is 
free, his faculties are his own, his thoughts and 
volitions and choices are as completely his own as 
if the divine were extinct. 

If Christianity is to be embraced by a thought- 
ful man, it will be because it seems reasonable to 
him, and not to somebody else, to embrace it. He 
who believes what his own reason does not accept 
in so far throws away his noblest gift and becomes 
not a saint of God, but a man of wood. 

Jacobi said : " By my faith I am a Christian ; 
by my reason I am a heathen. ^^ Such a false idea 
is based on a false psychology. Man^s soul is an 
indivisible unit, a spiritual atom. We cannot 
speak of the reason and the will as different parts 



14 Christianity Supernatural 

of the soul, in the way that we speak of the head 
and the foot as different parts of the body. Facul- 
ties are attitudes, energies of the soul. It is utterly 
unpsychological to say that our faith or feeling 
goes one way and our reason another. A faith 
that has not evidence somewhere is not faith at 
all, but complete folly. A faith that builds on 
evidence has reason for its consulting architect. 
Faith means assent ; assent means conviction ; 
conviction means evidence. Evidence without 
faith is skepticism ; faith without evidence is 
superstition. 

Of course, the tests applied must be suited to 
the truths presented. Right reason would never 
apply mathematical tests to poetical effusions, or 
ethical criteria to a scientific truth. It is not a test 
of an army that it cannot write an epic, or of an 
"earthquake that it did not shake a demonstra- 
tion of Euclid.^' It is folly to try to weigh truth 
in an apothecary's scales or to measure it with 
a carpenter's rule. Scales for quinine and yard- 
slicks for muslin, but the truths of Christianity 
must have tests that are suited to their nature and 
evidence. Pascal says : " We know the truth not 
only by the reason, but by the heart.'' Much 
depends upon the kind of truth that is known. 
It would hardly be venturing very far to say that 
the heart has not much to do in assenting to 



Introductory 15 

a geometrical theorem or accepting a chemical 
formula. 

It is a great mistake to imagine that Chris- 
tianity is any less rational because its teachings 
are not mathematical demonstrations. Reason 
stamps its vise upon a vast deal that the mathe- 
matician would throw out. The moral qualities 
of the mind are almost decisive in fixing its faith 
or its doubt. The wish is oftener father to the 
faith than to the thought. Every mind brings to 
its inquiry its own presuppositions. It may try 
very hard not to, but it is bound to fail. Public 
sentiment is an atmosphere, and a man must 
breathe it or die. We all have our prejudices, 
and they are often strongest when we are uncon- 
scious of them. Often, to deny them is only to 
own them. The prejudices are not much less 
than prejudgments in the mind, and hence we see 
how difficult it is for Christianity to secure a fair 
hearing. No mind is a blank ; it is in an attitude 
of belief or unbelief. In matters of Christianity, 
unbelief is another name for disbelief. The soul 
abhors a spiritual vacuum ; failure to believe is 
positive rejection of the faith. And so it is that 
when the human reason is appealed to in behalf of 
Christianity, the first task in hand is to convince 
an unfriendly judge. 

Christianity does not regard cold reason as the 



16 Christianity Supernatural 

only judge. The court of reason is the court of 
original jurisdiction, and as in criminal jurispru- 
dence there is never an appeal from an acquittal, 
so, if unbelief is acquitted in the judgment of 
reason, Christianity is finally vetoed. This is why 
the findings of the reason are so important. If 
its verdict is against Christianity, the case is 
closed ; if in favor of it, then it is eager to prove 
its claims in every appellate court. 

If Christianity does not have that which com- 
mands the conviction and controls the correspond- 
ing rational action of men, then, after all, it has 
" come to naught.^^ ^^ Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and thou shalt be saved. ^^ But how shall 
a rational mind believe on him without seeing 
something in him that calls out its faith ? ^^ Faith 
Cometh by hearing,^' and the preacher is sent that 
men may hear. Without believable elements in 
the message, the suggestion of being " saved '^ for 
believing it would be nothing less than a cor- 
rupting bribe which a reasonable man must forego 
his honorable manliness in order to accept. 

The same authority that exacts the faith sees to 
it that the fullest evidence is set forth in the gos- 
pel that is given. ^^ Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart.'^ It were an insult 
to demand a rational being^s love^ except as its 
object is revealed as one ineffably lovable, mani- 
festly lovely. Paul tells the Thessalonians to 



Introductory 17 

^^ rejoice/^ but they were fools even to try to 
rejoice except as they saw reasons for rejoicing. 
Just so it is that when Christianity claims the 
deepest reverence of the soul and exacts the highest 
tribute of man's rational being, it also reveals 
truths, presents incentives, and proposes motives 
that are worthy to move the truest, the noblest, 
the best that is within him. 

Somewhere and somehow, then, the reason 
has its work to do in accepting Christianity, and 
it is out of regard for that work that evidences of 
Christianity are called for and produced. The 
high rationalist declares that there can be no evi- 
dences of Christianity apart from such as are in 
Christianity. " He argued not, but preached, 
and conscience did the rest.^^ This is very much 
the view expressed by Origen in the preface to his 
book in answer to the argumentative assaults of 
Celsus. The truth is its own best defense. The 
Bible is the best book of apologetics ; the simple 
statement of pure Christianity is its own best 
argument, and the character of Jesus of Nazareth 
is the most effective ansAver to all his assailants. 

This idea has been pushed too far, so as to ex- 
clude or disparage certain evidence of great value. 
Really, it is a question whether any evidence can 
properly be called extraneous. It is rather a part, 
an element, of the thing it evidences. For example, 

2 



18 Christianity Supernatural 

we shall hardly put Christianity on one side^ and 
miracles on the other^ and say that these are a 
proof of that. We shall more accurately say that 
while miracles have their evidential value, they 
are still a part of the whole for which they stand. 
Christianity minus miracles would be per se a 
different thing entirely from Christianity as it is. 
So also with prophecy and the moral evidences 
from Christian history. There can be no doubt 
that latterly, with the disposition to emphasize 
the intrinsic, self-evidencing, rational and moral 
aspects of Christianity, there has been a tendency 
to minimize certain apologetic factors in the 
Christian system which in former times were pos- 
sibly made too much of, but which, rightly appre- 
hended, have their place of no small importance 
as integral elements of a complete Christianity. 

If there is in Christianity that which overtops 
our reason, then our reason must see evidence for 
believing so. The client may not know much 
law, but he is right in wanting good evidence that 
his attorney knows the law. The patient under- 
stands nothing about drugs, but he wants evidence 
which he can pass upon that his physician knows 
drugs well. We cannot compass all the truth 
nor all the grace which Christianity reveals, but 
we are entirely right in expecting it to pro- 
duce good proof- that it is truth and that it is 
grace. 



Introductory 19 

We have no quarrel with anyone who de- 
preciates the " evidences/^ if he will content him- 
self with saying that Christianity never reaches 
high-tide mark along apologetical lines. Proving 
Christianity true is something of an afterthought. 
There must first be seen the truth to be proven. 
Paul apologized for '' boasting/^ but his enemies, 
who were trying to wreck the church which he 
had founded at Corinth, " compelled ^^ him. The 
persistent opposers of Christianity compel its 
champions to show that, if they have whereof to 
boast, the Christians have much more. Seeing 
that many gloried after the flesh, Paul gloried also ; 
seeing that many glory in the evidences of the 
truth, let us glory also. The vocation of the apolo- 
gist will doubtless be obsolete in heaven. Even 
now the best blessings of the believer are in the 
spontaneous outflow of his joyous activities, rather 
than in the constrained reflective analysis of a 
guarded self-defense. Principal Caird has w^ell 
said : ^^It is impossible to enjoy at one and the 
same moment the blessedness of devotion and the 
colder satisfaction of reflex thought.^^^ 

It is better to be preaching than to be proving ; 
it is better to be evangelizing than to be analyzing. 
Still, the work of modern apologetics is of the 
very greatest importance, and while its primary 
aim may be that of intellectual conciliation rather 

^ An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion^ p. 42. 



20 Christianity Supernatural 

than of spiritual edification, yet, in response to 
the peculiar conditions of modern thought and 
life, Christianity has needed those who are set for 
the defense, not less than those who are set for 
the proclamation, of the gospel. 

No, mere reason cannot save men. "Devils 
believe — and tremble.^^ Devils are orthodox, but 
they are orthodox devils. Rational assent does 
not make a Christian, but no one can be a Chris- 
tian without rational assent. It is well to know 
that the infidel has harder intellectual difficulties 
to face than the believer has. All things taken 
into the account, the reason finds it easier to 
believe Christianity true than to believe it false. 

If otherwise, then Christianity is only "an 
irrational pathological phenomenon,'' and will 
soon give place to something better ; then devo- 
tion is the child of ignorance ; then piety is im- 
becility, and Christian churches asylums for the 
feeble-minded. 

This is the issue that is met in the apologetics of 
to-day ; the life of Christianity is involved in the 
outcome. If something else is truer, then some- 
thing else is better, and something else is what 
the world needs and ought to have. Essential 
Christianity is eternal truth or it is eternally 
untrue. Man's reason now is but a reflection of 
the Eternal Reason, but right reason here is right 



Introductory 21 

reason everywhere ; and if the system of thought 
and force and life, which Christendom holds dear 
as its own life-blood and sacred as heaven itself;, 
is not to fade away as a morning mist, it is be- 
cause it has in itself and from itself that which 
evinces its inherent truth and proclaims it to all 
inquiring intelligences as the Eternal Thought 
of the ever-living God. 



Christianity is that religion in which the impulse and 
power to a blessed and holy life is bound up with faith in 
God as the Father of Jesus Christ. — Harnack. 

The Christian religion is one phenomenon, a totality, a 
whole, of which the ISTew Testament is only a part. We 
of to-day are in actual contact with a living Christianity 
which has persisted through nineteen centuries of chance 
and change. — Illingworth. 

In every generation it must henceforth become more and 
more recognized by logical thinking, that all antecedent 
objections to Christianity founded on reason alone are ipso 
facto nugatory. — Komanes. 

23 



CHAPTER II 



CHRISTIANITY 



In any discussion it is important to have a clear 
conception of the terms employed. 

It is no easy task to define '' Christianity." 
The things that are most familiar are often the 
things that puzzle us most when we would trans- 
late them into an exact logical equivalent. Try 
to define life^ nature, the sky, friendship, love, 
home, language, civilization, and the difficulty 
will appear. We think we know what they are 
until we essay a definition ; and we do know what 
they are. The ability to frame an accurate defi- 
nition, sharply including all that belongs to the 
thing defined and sharply excluding all that does 
not, is no fair test of our actual knowledge. 

We shall hardly presume, then, to construct an 
unexceptionable definition of Christianity. The 
broader the idea, the harder to define it ; the more 
familiar the concept, the more difficult to abstract 
it and make it the object of cold reflective contem- 
plation. If we can succeed in getting such a defi- 
nite conception of Christianity, therefore, as will 

25 



26 Christianity Supernatural 

answer our present purpose^ we shall not now 
attempt to do more. 

Christianity is one of the world^s great religions. 
The ethnologist catalogues it among the sacred 
systems of mankind. To dispute the justice of 
this is to anticipate conclusions which presuma- 
bly the student of Christian evidence has not yet 
reached. Ideally^ and only ideally, he begins his 
study without bias, pro or con. His first gen- 
eral impression, at least, will be that the other 
systems arrogate to themselves everything which 
Christianity presumes to be. To call it the Religio 
Licita among the disallowed systems is to publish 
to the w^orld the verdict before the case has been 
tried. 

Perhaps we may as well regard Christianity as 
over against two opposing positions. The first is 
in distinction from the ethnic religions to which 
we have just referred. Not that there are not 
elements of truth in them ; not that there are not 
valuable ethical factors in some of them, in com- 
mon with Christianity ; not that we would cir- 
cumscribe the gracious work of the sovereign 
Spirit who '' works when, where, and how he 
willeth^^ ; not that we would take for granted the 
supernatural elements which Christians declare 
to be sufficient to distinguish their faith preemi- 
nently from all the rest ; but, regarding the specific 



Christianity 27 

nature of the task set before us^ namely, the con- 
sideration of the Christian scheme, excluding the 
religious aspects of the natural and moral world 
which the faith of the Bible contemplates in com- 
mon with some of the extra-biblical faiths ; and 
remembering that our lifelong familiarity with 
the whole subject makes unnecessary a restate- 
ment of all the elements involved in the problem, 
we at once narrow our range from that of religion 
in general, with its vast field of theistic evidences 
and human aspirings, to the Christian religion as 
the substantial equivalent of Christianity. And, 
too, we are to consider Christianity as over against 
no-religion. It is true that any religion is better 
than none. " The good is the enemy of the best,'^ 
only when that good crystallizes into a finality ; it 
is a friend of the best when it is willing to be a 
preparation and stepping-stone to it. Ante-Chris- 
tian Judaism, on the one hand, as God designed 
it to be, and, on the other, as perverted by Jewish 
bigotry, well illustrates the difference. Mission- 
aries know how great is that difference on pagan 
and Moslem soil to-day. Religion within, which 
is the antecedent of religion without, is universal. 
Atheism is the festered fruit of a self-conscious 
civilization. A man must be pedagogued and 
pampered away from his naive self before he can 
be an atheist. He must be always on his guard 
against his spontaneous natural self. " The cor- 



28 Christianity Supernatural 

niption of the best things is the worst/^ and it 
takes a genuine Christian civilization to produce, 
like rankest weeds in richest gardens, the most 
conspicuous specimens of the genus irreligiosum. 

Prof. John Fiske says : '^ Atheism is bad meta- 
physics.'^ There is no point of view from which 
it is not bad, but for present purposes we shall 
leave that for the writer of another treatise in this 
series to prove. 

Christianity is such a large and many-sided 
complex that it is not strange that Christians 
themselves have sometimes made the sincere mis- 
take of putting a part or phase of it for the 
whole. 

It is not a system of truth only. Theology is 
not all of Christianity, any more than anatomy is 
all of physiology. Still, it would be a flabby 
physiology without the anatomical skeleton, and 
it would be a flaccid faith that has no theological 
framework w^ithin. 

There is little need just now of emphasizing 
the thought that Christianity is not all dogma. 
This view is in danger of over-emphasis, and 
we need someone to tell us again that dogma has 
its place in the Christian scheme, and that, though 
a creed or confession is not Christianity, yet there 
is no healthy Christianity without a creed and con- 
fession. Still, we are not to forget that the essen- 



Christianity 29 

tial elements are those which are before and back 
of these confessions^ making them what they are. 

Christianity is not a pious state or feeling only. 
No danger is greater than that of mistaking a 
morbid^ vision-expecting subjectivism for the 
true thing. If it is not a dogmatic system^ much 
less is it an emotional ebullition of the sensibili- 
ties of men. If it were only this^ then Christian 
evidences would be an absurdity ; for how can a 
feeling be shown to be true ? Neither does this 
turbulent and unsteady flow of fervid feeling any 
more become essential Christianity by being en- 
larged into the ceaseless and majestic stream that 
comes flowing on from age to age through the 
common religious consciousness of mankind^ or, 
indeed, through the common Christian conscious- 
ness of the universal Church. 

Christianity is not an ethical order only. It 
is fundamentally religious in its origin, its con- 
tents, and its commands. It declines to baptize 
anyone as its devotee who nobly serves his fellow- 
man, but who ignores his God ; who affects to 
love his brother, and yet who hates his Lord. It 
traces all high ambition and achievement to the 
hand that is Divine, and centers all duty and 
destiny in the will of Him whose supreme right 
it is to rule. Christianity is not an institution or 
a form only. It is primarily spiritual. It enjoins 
and charters forms, but they are forms only. If 



30 Christianity Supernatural 

these forms lack the substance which is essential 
Christianity^ they degenerate into mere formalism 
which is Christianity stagnant and decadent. The 
Church is an integral part of organic Christianity ; 
its institutions and ordinances are not to be de- 
spised^ but they are not all of Christianity. 

Christianity is not a life only. It is life — life 
divine^ life enkindling, life bestowing ; but it is 
more. There are truths to be believed ; there are 
facts to be contemplated ; there are principles to 
be regarded ; there are duties to be performed. 
While this divine life^ mystic and mysterious, is 
the quickening force that makes the dead alive 
with a life that is eternal, still it is a mistake, 
that has been made, to regard this life as all of 
Christianity, and so to rob its followers of those 
stable and permanent elements w^hich it contains, 
and which are at once the basis of their strongest 
character and the crown of their highest culture. 

Christianity is not a sect only. No matter 
which is the part cutting off^ and which cut off, 
neither one nor both can be all of Christianity. 
Newman said : " Whatever be historical Chris- 
tianity, it is not Protestantism.^^ And Principal 
Fairbairn answers : '' And we may add, still less 
is it Catholicism.'^ Both are right in what they 
say, and both are wrong in what they do not say, 
if they regard either Protestantism or Catholicism 
as a synonym for catholic Christianity. 



Christianity 31 

Christianity is the religion of Jesus Christ : 
actually, as it is ; ideally, as it would be. It 
stands over against all other vsy stems that claim 
the religious faith and homage of mankind, and 
against that self-exiling no-religion which kills 
the highest life of men. 

It is not dogma only, though it has its dogmatic 
side. It is not feeling only, though every soul 
it touches has deep and vivid emotions respond- 
ing to that touch. It is not a code of morals 
only, though it has its ethical principles and pre- 
cepts, its ^Hhou shalt^^ and ^Hhou shalt not.'^ 
It is not a form only, though the forms and in- 
stitutions it sanctions in the holy Church are for 
the honor of God and the good of men. It is 
not a life only, though it is life and gives life to 
all who will heartily receive it. It is not a sect 
only, though it cannot be denied that the saint- 
liest and best of its champions in every age have 
been loyally identified with some branch or divis- 
ion of the Church of God on earth. 

In presenting and considering evidences in its 
support, it is obvious that Christianity must ipso 
facto be contemplated as a system of religious 
thought. Historically, doctrinally, ethically, or 
practically, apologetics view the intellectual as- 
pects of Christianity; or, in any case, view its 
elements intellectually. Evidence is nonsense 



32 Christianity Supernatural 

except as it establishes something to be true. 
Christianity purports to be true ; and so^ whatever 
may be the final conclusion^ it is necessary^ in 
passing upon its right to our credence, to regard 
it in the character of a body of truth : truth only 
tentatively, if its evidence be found to be inade- 
quate, but finally and formally if it be found 
to be convincing and conclusive. 

Christianity is the complex, organic, historic 
system of religious truth which has for its origin 
the Infinite God, for its charter the Scriptures of 
the Old and New Testament, for its efficiency the 
Immanent Spirit, and for its Revelator, its in- 
spiration and its goal, Jesus Christ, the Son of 
God, who became human in history, who lived 
and died for the redemption of man, and who 
rose again from the dead. " Objectively Chris- 
tianity is Christ himself and the redeeming work 
which has its source in his Person. Subjectively 
it is faith in him as Redemption manifested — 
the experience of this redeeming work in the 
heart.''' 

1 Christlieb's Mode7m Doubt a7id Christian Faith^ p. 39. 



Many of the utterances ascribed to Jesus, which involve 
a Messianic consciousness, plainly breathe the spirit of 
lowliness rather than that of arrogance or vainglory. — 
Bruce. 

How can we regard as practically true, conceptions which 
are acknowledged to be theoretically false? — Ed. Caird. 

No better definition of truth can be given than that of 
Edwards, who makes it the image of existence, the corre- 
spondence of mind with reality, of thought with being. — 
Gordon. 

3 33 



CHAPTER III 

THE ^^ CLAIMS ^^ OF CHRISTIANITY 

Either Christianity is what it represents 
itself to be^ or it is false. It may be regarded 
as an excellent system of ethics ; but^ if it be 
found that it declares itself to be more^ but is 
not more^ then its false representations make it 
less. We form our judgment upon any question 
of moral worth not only upon what the object 
of judgment is, but also upon what it purports 
to be. We consider not only character^ but also 
profession ; profession also, because it becomes • 
an element in the manifestation, and, therefore, 
in the judgment of the character. A peasant may 
be all right as a peasant ; only if he pose as the 
son of a prince, we lose our confidence in him as 
a peasant. A prestidigitator may not be a bad 
character as such ; but if in his juggleries he 
claim to be in confidential relations with the 
spirit- world, we revise our judgment of the ethi- 
cal virtues of the juggler. A human saint merits 
our highest reverence ; but if we find him pro- 
fessing, like some Hindoo avatar, to be Divinity 

35 



36 Christianity Supernatural 

incarnate, we must change the viewpoint of our 
regard. 

Christianity as a doctrine, or an institution, or 
a life, is one thing; Christianity purporting to 
be a revelation from heaven, is quite another. 
The question of origins, therefore, enters very 
largely into the question of its character. If 
Christianity is only evolved from below, while 
it keeps telling us that it is given from above, 
then, with all its high principles and holy incen- 
tives, it is guilty of falsehood. If it claim to be 
what it is not, it breaks our faith in what it is. 

Hence the importance, in Christian evidence, 
of what have been not very happily called the 
" claims ^^ of Christianity. The rationalist ex- 
cepts very strongly to the idea conveyed in the 
phrase, insisting that the judgment of Christianity 
must always be based upon the intrinsic excellence 
of its contents ; and that, if it put forth any evi- 
dences of an external kind or any ^^ claims'^ out- 
side of its very self, they are incidental, adventi- 
tious, superfluous, almost puerile. If it be true, 
nothing else can make it truer ; and if it be not 
true, nothing else can make it less false. It is 
folly to deny that there is truth in this position, 
only it must not for a moment be forgotten that 
all that can properly be meant by the " claims ^^ 
of Christianity is a necessary and integral part 



Tlie " Claims '' of Christianity 37 

of Christ'anity itself, when rightly and fully ap- 
prehended. 

The harsh suggestion that Christianity argues 
'' claims '^ and makes spec'al pleadings for the 
favorable judgment of men is wholly a gratuitous 
importation from foreign sources. We shall 
hardly charge a man with arrogance, who, having 
business with us, tells us plainly who he is. The 
suffering victim of a railway collision in a foreign 
country will be glad to have the kind stranger 
who approaches him tell him that he is a physi- 
cian ; and the higher the grade of credentials he 
can show, the more fortunate will the sufferer 
count himself. Assuming, for the moment, that 
Christianity is a revelation from God, then why 
in all reason should it refrain from revealing 
itself to be such? It brings its message — itself; 
but it must not prove to a doubting hearer, for- 
sooth, that it is such a message. It must not make 
known at full value what it is, for then there 
will be occasion for an offended rationalist to 
hurl at it the charge of excessive self-conscious- 
ness and of attitudinizing for the suffrages of man- 
kind. Not being a Platonic-like philosophy, 
Christianity has never disguised its solicitude 
concerning the disposition which men shall make 
of it. It does appeal for their faith ; it does 
plead for their acceptance. It is nothing to the 
physician whether the half-dead sufferer he finds 



38 Christianity Supernatural 

will accept his ministrations and remedies^ but it 
is everything to the sufferer himself. The physi- 
cian is there simply for the sake of the victim. 
He may argue his experience and produce his 
diplomas simply to persuade the victim to take 
the relief he is ready to bestow. 

It is for the sake of mankind that Christianity 
would approve itself as true. Its errand is rather 
that of the philanthropist than of the philosopher. 
Its truth is revealed for the sake of the good it 
will do. It ^^ claims^' nothing in a sinister or 
selfish spirit — by no means ; it only produces its 
mighty truths and proclaims its holy evangels in 
such a way as best to overcome the barriers and 
meet the needs of the clouded and enfeebled human 
reason. 

It will hardly be disputed that Christianity 
does purport to be more than an ordinary product 
of history. The Bible throughout gives the im- 
pression that its contents are not elsewhere acces- 
sible to men. Its majestic tone^ in effect^ declines 
to recognize any rival in its sphere. From first 
to last^ it stands as the utterance of the One God 
whose very existence its own relation to him 
makes it unnecessary either to argue or even for- 
mally to announce. Its contents are understand- 
able only on the theory that that assumption is cor- 
rect. The Scriptures are a deliverance rather than 



Tlie '' Claims '' of Christianity 39 

a demonstration, an imperative rather than a sub- 
junctive. They sublimely take for granted what 
the world's philosophic systems have, with doubt- 
ful success, been striving in their own way to elab- 
orate. This very fact and feature differentiates 
Christianity's Book from all others in the litera- 
tures of the past. It invests it with the mighty 
majesty of conscious truth. 

This impression grows upon the mind as we 
read into the pages of the Testaments. God's 
relations to his creature-w^orld, his dealings with 
the sons of men, his displeasure at their sin^ his 
visitation of the penalties of sin upon the antedi- 
luvian races, his call to Abram of Ur, his dis- 
cipline and deliverance of a certain people, his 
theocratic education of the Hebrew nationality, 
his frequent utterances of righteousness by the 
mouth of chosen prophets : and, through it all, 
his directing of the destinies of nations, his 
turning of the tides of history for the final accom- 
plishment of his fore-ordered ends : all this, read 
between the lines and in the lines of the Old Tes- 
tament, bespeaks an origin that is unique and an 
authorship which, while truly human, is also as 
truly divine. 

The New Testament more than sustains this 
character. It describes One of whom the ancient 
prophets spoke, for whom the ancient saints of 
God, in wearied patience, looked. "As it is 



40 Christianity Supernatural 

written ^^ is its frequent refrain. The Bethlehem 
manger presents, in its beginnings^ the realized 
promise of waiting ages. Along the norms of 
human childhood, the Child to manhood grew. 
By and by, tlie dove descends and the Messiah 
stands forth complete. The audacity of an im- 
postor in all this is absolutely out of the question. 
By his quiet, conscious possession of resources sur- 
passing those of other men, his character shines 
solitary as it is sublime. He makes no unseemly 
haste to declare his mission or to proclaim him- 
self divine ; yet he suffers no opportunity to pass 
in which a mock modesty might conceal from men 
that he is indeed the Son of God. Nicodemus 
comes at night to cross-question him concerning 
his miracles, and, with a spiritual insight into the 
relations of things that is amazing, he answers 
that the kingdom of heaven means a newborn life. 
In Solomon's porch, the Jews met him squarely 
with the challenge, ^' If thou be the Christ, tell us 
plainly/^ and, seeing that true faith is built upon 
more than a single word, he quietly refers them 
to his teachings and his works. Asked if he 
be the King of the Jews, modestly but affirma- 
tively he answers, " Thou sayest.^' They justly 
charge any man with blasphemy who would pre- 
sume to forgive sin, and yet to the palsied man 
he said: ^^ Thy sins be forgiven thee.'^ And as 
the man, commanded so to do, took up his bed and 



The '^ Claims ^^ of Christianity 41 

walked^ the astonished beholders could draw their 
own inferences. They charge Jesus with making 
himself equal with God, and he meets their 
charge with consenting silence. They worship 
him, and he forbids them not. Prophets and 
apostles said, ^^Thus saith the Lord.^^ He said, 
^^ Verily, verily, / say unto you.^^ The crown of 
humility sat in regal majesty upon the brow of the 
Incarnate God. 

Nor, if this is true, is this all the truth. A 
divine Christ was not done with mankind when 
he was laid away in the Arimathsean's tomb. 
Resurgam! His rising again is the burden of 
apostolic proclamation. The promised Guide and 
Comforter is come. The living Christianity of 
these subsequent centuries is an answering fulfill- 
ment of the divine Christ's promise. Christianity 
did not evaporate when the clouds received him 
out of the sight of the gazing men of Galilee. 
Pentecost was the birthplace and birth-hour of 
the universal Christianity, now fully come. The 
impulse, dating from that predicted day, and in- 
creasing in power and accomplishment with the 
lapse of time, is a part of the Christianity that is 
divine. The Christ risen is the Christ indwelling. 
The enthroned King is the enshrined Saviour. The 
sunbeam is an expression, an emanation, a part, of 
the sun. The magnificent career of Christianity, 
beginning with the conquering outbursts of apos- 



42 Christianity Supernatural 

tolic unction and gathering force and volume even 
up to this very moment, is but the predestined 
continuous development of the supernatural work 
which Jesus came to do. That work will not be 
done, that development will not be complete, until 
the redeeming purposes of grace shall have been 
fully consummated. 

Right gladly do we view the Christianity of the 
nineteenth century of our era as identical with that 
of the days of Jesus himself and of Paul and John. 
No* day, no event, no issue was too remote from 
him to be contemplated in the inauguration of 
his age-long work. The delays and disappoint- 
ments that, in ignorant or doubting misapprehen- 
sion, may embarrass his disciples are but eddies 
and detours in the fulfillment of his plan, while 
the expansions and triumphs of his kingdom are 
only the clearer revealings of the supernatural and 
the divine. 

If we must answer for the character of the Chris- 
tianity of the present, we may also avail ourselves 
of the accumulating evidences in its behalf, that 
are emerging in all lands to-day. Jesus appealed 
to his works to convince the doubting, nearly nine- 
teen hundred years ago; but '^greater works than 
these ^^ are in these last days wrought on the earth in 
his name. Once supernatural, always supernat- 
ural ; and if the Christianity of the Nazarene and of 
Athanasius and Polycarp and Peter was, in origin. 



Tlie " Claims ^' of Christianity 43 

in power^ in character^ and in results, supernatural^ 
then not less so is the Christianity of Luther and 
Knox, of Wesley and Chalmers, of Spurgeon and 
Moody, of Livingstone and Duff, of Judson and 
Nevius. The Spirit of the Lord has been upon 
these, his servants among men ; he hath anointed 
them to preach the gospel to the poor ; he hath 
sent them to heal the broken-hearted, to preach 
deliverance to the captives and recovering of sight 
to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bound, 
to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. 

This very day is this very Scripture fulfilled in 
our ears. 



Mental causation is not reduced to physical by diluting it 
with duration. — Martineau. 

Inquiring into the pedigree of an idea is not a bad means 
of roughly estimating its value. — Spencer. 

The beginning and the end of what is the matter with us 
in these days is that we have forgotten God. — Carlyle. 

The pantheist is but a bashful atheist. — Heine. 

45 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SUPERNATURAL 

Christianity itself being witness^ then, it is 
not natural^ but supernatural. The issue is clear. 
If it be not supernatural, it is untrue. It stakes 
everything on its own veracity. It cannot be at 
the same time only natural and wholly true. 

It is quite in order to insist upon this point 
nowadays. We shall not presume to pass upon 
the right of evolution to have and to hold so 
large a place in modern thought, but it is pre- 
suming little indeed to say thus much : that if the 
Bible be true, if the words of Jesus are to be 
taken at their face meaning, and if the consensus 
of Christian people from the apostles down has any 
bearing upon the question, then Christianity is not 
the product of nature^s forces ; nor can it even 
be accounted for by all the magic and mysterious 
processes that are combined and labeled under 
the general name of evolution. Any attempt to 
do this in any interest whatever is conceived in 
error and fraught with gravest perils. When we 
read that '[ no man can run up the natural lines 

47 



48 Christianity Supernatural 

of evolution without coming to Christianity at 
the top/' and that " the facts and processes which 
have received the name of Christian are the con- 
tinuations of the scientific order/' ^ we are equally 
grieved whether we regard the view of the esteemed 
author as^ on the one hand^ the degradation of 
Christianity, or, on the other, the apotheosis of 
evolution. If the Christianity of the gospels be 
unchanged, then surely the natural order that can 
produce it is greater than its product, and nature 
itself is therefore supernaturalized. 

It -is extremely doubtful whether this is either 
good science or good theology. Indeed, if it were 
one, it would need only the transposition to ap- 
pear as the other. Certainly the consensus of 
scientists is no more with the science of it than 
is that of the theologians with its theology. If 
this is the ^^new testament of evolution,'' then 
Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace were the Moses 
and Aaron of the old dispensation, and the chosen 
race seem, with true Hebraistic pertinacity, to de- 
cline the gospel of the new era. Prof. Huxley 
refuses to see any ethical possibilities in the cos- 
mic order. Mr. Darwin saw egoism only, and 
the egoism he saw is nothing if not the death of 
altruism. This new testament of evolution is not 
a ^^fulfillment,'' but a contradiction of the old, 
and hence it is that biological evolution can 

^ Prof. Drummond's The Ascent of Man^ pp. 342-3. 



The Supernatural 49 

scarcely claim the parentage of an altruistic, love- 
born, love-inculcating Christianity. 

Just here is the crucial test point of present- 
day apologetics. We must be on our guard alike 
against an avowed opponent who would gain his 
end not by assailing Christianity immediately, 
but by eviscerating the supernatural, and against 
a sincere friend who, under cover of sympathy 
with doubt, would practically abandon every dis- 
tinctive position worth contending for. 

To relinquish the supernatural is to forsake 
evangelical Christianity : for, if it be not super- 
natural, it is not what it has been believed to be ; 
it is not what it represents itself to be. " The 
Christianity that is become a part only of nature, 
or is classified under nature, is Christianity ex- 
tinct.''' 

The idea of the supernatural is purely relative. 
Its meaning waits upon the definition of nature. 
The Duke of Argyll includes man in nature, 
thus giving the term its widest import, embracing 
all that is 

' ' In the round ocean and the living air 
And the blue sky and in the mind of man. ' ' ^ 

Dr. Bushnell defines nature so as to exclude 
man, seeing that his will is a self-initiating effi- 

^ Bushnell's Nature and the Supernatural^ p. 21. 
2 Wordsworth's Tintern Abhey. 



50 Christianity Supernatural 

ciency. Plainly, therefore, Bushnell makes man 
supernatural, while the Duke of Argyll does 
not. Many, with Dr. Harris of Yale, regard the 
dividing line as that between the personal and 
the impersonal.^ This makes man supernatural. 
The tendency of a purely physical science, 
attempting the impossible feat of breaking away 
from metaphysics, is to enlarge the realm of nature 
until its correlative has reached the vanishing 
point. Materialism repudiates the supernatural 
in its very first assumption. A naturalistic evolu- 
tion pushes it farther and farther into the back- 
ground. Mr. Spencer may not say with Mole- 
schott, ^^No thought without phosphorus,^^ but 
he does say that thought and feeling and will are 
higher evolution points in the nerve life, and so 
of course Mr. Spencer would scorn to agree with 
Dr. Bushnell. The whole scale of possible views, 
from that which makes everything supernatural 
to the absolute zero point of universal naturalism, 
has been traversed in the ranges of modern 
thought. If nature is the ally then there is no 
supernatural ; or if all that is is supernatural, 
then there is no nature. Both views are false in 
themselves and evil in effect. It is said that 
God is everywhere, and, wherever God is, his 
ever-active energy is at work ; and so, in the 
rolling of the ocean, the whirling of a planet, 
^ The Self -revelation of God^ p. 84. 



The Supernatural 51 

and the tinting of a rose-leaf^ the divine Energy 
is as truly at work as in the creation of a world 
or the calming of a Galilsean storm. Or^ shifting 
our standpoint, we are told to contemplate the 
sphere of second causes, and, remembering the 
rigid uniformity of their operation, that we are 
able to reduce to a strictly scientific formula the 
slow formation of a crystal in the earth, the ap- 
pearance of a star world in space, and the emer- 
gence of a new species in animated nature, as 
well as the evolution of a civilization and the 
moral and spiritual achievements of a human 
race. All that is, they say, is nature^s product. 
Nature works by laws. Science traces those 
laws, and, as men\s perceptions are quickened 
and their minds are widened, they are more and 
more subduing the whole field of knowable truth 
and reducing it to the cold tabulated schedules 
of scientific knowledge. 

There is a vast diflFerence between the notion 
that God is in everything and that God is every- 
thing. The one says that God is every what^ and 
the other that God is every ivhere, God is omni- 
present. His infinite being fills immensity. His 
cosmical energy is never-resting. All second 
causes are God^s forces, not less efficient because 
their efficiency is not self-originated, but derived 
from God. All that is is, because he sustains it. 



52 Christianity Supernatural 

A creature would cease to be a creature the mo- 
ment it became absolutely independent of its 
Creator. God^s immanent power shimmers in 
the sunbeam, trembles in the aspen leaf, and 
whistles in the night storm. God is the hidden 
eflBciency in all the processes of nature/ He sent 
the storm into the sea, he prepared the fish, he 
prepared the gourd, he prepared the worm that 
smote the gourd, and he brought all this to bear 
upon the moral discipline of the runaway preacher, 
the son of Amittai. He clothes the grass of the 
field, he feeds the ravens when they cry, and not 
a sparrow falls to the ground without his notice. 
His power upholds, his presence fills, the uni- 
verse; but we shall not therefore say he is the 
universe. 

Strange as it may seem, it is true that Christian 
faith to-day, in its rebound from a God-exiling 
materialism, is in actual danger of falling off back- 
ward into the mire of pantheism. A neo-Hegelian 
philosophy would fain usher in a new reign of the 
God-intoxicated Spinoza. To identify the natural 
and the supernatural is either, on the one hand, to 
deny the former and to become what the technicist 
would call an acosmic pantheist — all God and no 
world — or, on the other hand, to deny the latter 
and to become an atheistic pancosmist — all world 
and no God. The former obliterates science and 
^ See Psalm civ. 



The Supernatural 53 

makes all knowledge theology ; the latter oblit- 
erates theology and makes all knowledge natural 
science. 

Materialism is an exploded theory to-day. It 
would appear that we are on the verge of an era 
of revived metaphysics. Men are seeing again 
that all physics back up against metaphysics. 
Signs will fail if the great battles of faith and 
unbelief in the next score of years are not fiercest 
upon questions of psychology and personality and 
rationality. 

Idealism is rising again into the ascendant, but 
logically idealism is often the metaphysical name 
for pantheism. Spinoza had his defender in 
Hegel, and Spencerian evolution is a sort of 
revival of their faith. It is not atheism that is 
to be feared from that quarter, it is ahosmism; 
but the one is as bad as the other. Dr. Edward 
Caird says : " Hegel rightly answered those who 
accused Spinoza of atheism, by saying that he 
was not an atheist, but an ^akosmist;'. it was 
not God, but the world of finite things, whose 
reality he denied.'^ ^ 

To be sure, not a few would promptly refuse 
to be held to such a philosophy as that, plainly 
stated; but precisely that is their underlying 
philosophy when they say, with an air of ethereal 
devoutness which a certain wing of recent litera- 

1 The Evolution of Religion^ i. 104. 



54 Christianity Supermatural 

ture is rather fond of affecting, " Oh^ everything 
is supernatural/^ 

This doctrine of the supernatural is the irre- 
pressible postulate of human thought. Emman- 
uel Swedenborg taught his strange and not un- 
fascinating theory of correspondences between the 
natural and the supernatural. Bishop Butler 
argued his doctrine of analogy between them. 
The Duke of Argyll, agreeing with Babbage in 
his famous Bridgewater treatise, regards the work- 
ings of the supernatural as only the outworkings 
of the occult and unknown laws of nature, thus 
locating the miraculous rather in man^s ignorance 
than in God^s power. Professor Drummond, in 
his first book, took Butler's idea of analogy and 
pressed it boldly, but not quite convincingly, into 
that of absolute identity. Again, we are told that 
telepathy, as the generic law of all psychical activ- 
ities, is the rationale of the mysterious,^ while 
there are others w^ho, subsidizing the marvels of 
our civilization, presume to say that electricity ^^ is 
the secret for which men are hunting. John H. 
Jamieson, in a somewhat hazy book, announces that 
he has found the right solution in the reciprocity 
or coordination of the natural and the supernat- 
ural.^ The favorite idea of the day seems to be 

^ See The Law of Psychic Phenomena^ t>y T- J- Hudson. 
' See Marie Corelli's Romance of Two Worlds^ p. 286. 
^ ChrisVs Idea of the Supernatural. 



The Supernatural 55 

that expressed by Jean Paul Richter : ^^ The mira- 
cle on earth is nature in heaven/^ What is super- 
natural in natural spheres is natural in supernat- 
ural ones. There is a positive infatuation in this 
conception ; its fatal weakness is in its play on the 
word ^^ nature/^ If there is a system of nature 
in planes higher than our own, one of two things 
will be true of it : either it is like our system, or 
it is not. If it is like ours, then to carry difficul- 
ties in thought from our world to that is to shift 
the problem, but not to solve it. If it is not like 
ours, then we, ostrich-like, deceive ourselves by 
naming ^^ nature'^ what upon the admitted hypoth- 
esis is not a nature at all, but something else. If 
we naturalize the phenomena of spheres that to us 
are si^j^ernatural, what is that but harnessing the 
powers of the Almighty to our thought-scheme 
and holding him to its modes ? But that is the 
bog of a universal naturalism which, if it have 
any God whatever, either, with Mr. Spencer, can- 
not know him, or, with ihe passe school of English 
Deism, places a '' scientific embargo ^^ upon his 
actions. Besides all this, legion is the name of 
those who, with contagious enthusiasm, insist that 
evolution is the bridge that spans the chasm be- 
tween the two. But granting ^Hhe two'^ concedes 
all we are now arguing for. If evolution grants 
an evolver and an evolved, it has granted the basis 
of our position. Supernaturalism is only another 



56 Christianity Supernatural 

name for Theism; that is^ remembering that 
Deism is dead, and therefore no longer worthy of 
respectful mention. Indeed, Deism believes in a 
God above nature. If there is a God, answering 
to mankind^s meaning of that sacred name, then 
the way is open to believe in the above-nature. 
We need not define nature, except to say that it 
does not include God. It may or may not include 
angels or men or occult forces, but, unless we take 
our definitions from the obsolete lexicons of de- 
funct materialism, nature does not include the 
Infinite and Eternal Personality who has created, 
now controls, and will control, all nature in accord- 
ance with his will, which is the only law creation 
can or does obey. 

He who makes everything supernatural is as 
much of an enemy of Christianity as he who 
makes nothing supernatural. If we emphasize 
every word in the sentence, we lose all emphasis. 
The supernatural is a figment of the fancy, with- 
out the natural to which it is super-ior. He who 
calls every day in the week Sabbath has no Sab- 
bath. He who does not work six days in the 
week is as guilty of breaking the fourth com- 
mandment as he who works on the seventh. 
There is a cant in philosophy as well as in the- 
ology or religion. He who sees God everywhere, 
pantheistically, is as wide of the truth as he who 



The Supernatural 57 

sees him nowhere, atheistically. When we call 
all men God incarnate, and all things God em- 
bodied, we are in danger of betraying everything 
by affirming everything. 

The only safe and sure ground is that of sound 
Scripture and sober science and common sense, 
that there is a God and that there is a world. 
Each is distinct from the other. The world de- 
pends upon God, but God does not depend upon 
the world. Without God, there never would 
have been a world ; from eternity God is, before 
the w^orlds were made.^ The tracing of the 
chains of phenomena in this created world is 
science. The study of God as he makes his 
ineffable being and holy nature known transcends 
science.^ There is no quarrel between the two. 
Their aims are different, their provinces are dis- 
tinct, their subject-matter is not the same. Each 
throws its light upon the other, and each is itself 
made more complete and perfect in the revealing 
presence of the other. The one is natural, the 
other is supernatural. 

1 See Psalm xc. 1, 2. 

2 The use of the terms " theology " and " science " in this 
contrasted sense is not meant to imply that theology is not 
scientific ; it is rather in accordance with the popular mean- 
ing of the word science as natural science. 



Law, in its most general and comprehensive sense, signi- 
fies a rule of action and is applied indiscriminately to all 
kinds of action, whether animate or inanimate, rational or 
irrational. — Blackstone. 

After all which has heen done by the sensuous littleness, 
the shallow pride, and the idolatry of science, to make a 
total universe, or even a God^ of nature, still it is nothing 
but the carpet on which we children play, and which we 
may use according to its design or may cut and burn and 
tear at will. — Bushnell. 

The cosmos is rather an utterance than an argument. — 
Denison. 

Subtilitas naturce longe superat suhtilitatem mentis humanoe. 
— Bacon. 

59 



CHAPTER V 

MIRACLES 

It is not in mind either clearly to define or ex- 
haustively to prove the existence of the supernatu- 
ral ; we may assume what all men already believe. 
A philosophy that regards as only natural, the 
origin and development of this universal belief in 
the supernatural, concedes the fact that such belief 
is universal. The faith may be a superstition ; its 
object may- be a fancy; still, the faith does prevail. 
Without question, many rude caricatures have dis- 
placed a sober faith in the divine. There is, 
however, a common substratum underlying all. 
such faith in a god or in God, from the lowest 
fetichism of the jungles to the purest spiritual 
faith of the Christian saint. A recent writer^ has 
done good service in calling attention to the fact 
that the scientific spirit, which aims to be so com- 
prehensive in its range and so impartial in its 
scrutinies, has signally failed in assigning proper 
importance to the religious spirit in man, and to 

^ Benj. Kidd's Social Evolution^ p. 22, 1st ed. 

61 



62 Christianity Supernatural 

its forces and institutions in society ; and this, too, 
simply as a fact to be accounted for, and as a phe- 
nomenon to be explained. This is true. It has 
too often been assumed that religion is superstition, 
and, as such, is therefore unworthy of scientific 
study. But, even so, superstition is a fact, and 
science is disloyal to itself if it do not attend to 
facts. And say Christianity is a huge superstition : 
certainly, with the hold which it has somehow been 
able to get upon the human race, with the influ- 
ence it has indisputably exerted upon the policies 
of history and upon the welfare of the nations, 
and with the astounding confidence that marks its 
attitude before the world to-day, as with undimin- 
ishing vigor it bids for the faith of men as over 
against the great creed-systems of the past, this 
stupendous phenomenon challenges the investiga- 
tion of science as scarcely any other can even 
claim to do. Religion is the most influential fac- 
tor in history ; it is the most powerful force in 
individual character; it is the foremost fact of 
sociology ; and that scientist is under the bondage 
of a prejudice more dishonoring than the super- 
stition he fain would despise, who, for any reason 
whatever, refuses to the objective fact of religion 
its place and importance among the facts presented 
for his contemplation. 

But faith in the supernatural is conceded to be 
the essential element in all religion. 



Miracles 63 

The question of miracles is involved in that of 
the supernatural, and the question of the super- 
natural is involved in that of God. Mr. J. S. 
Mill admitted that, if there be a God, the diffi- 
culty about miracles sinks into insignificance. 
His logic traced unbelief to its ultimate source, 
but every unbeliever in miracles is not possessed of 
Mr. MilPs faculty for logic. Mr. J. A. Froude 
said that prayer is nonsense without faith in mira- 
cles and the supernatural, and, when we come to 
think of it, the remark is so obviously true that 
it seems almost unworthy to be written. Only 
the atheist can dismiss the supernatural. 

But, granted the supernatural, many very im- 
portant conclusions follow. If that supernatural 
something be to us dead or dumb or in the distance, 
then it is not above but below nature, and the gold 
we have been seeking is but disappointing gravel 
after all. 

Goethe remarked : " What were a God who only 
gave the world a push from without or let it spin 
around his finger ?^^ What Carlyle called ^^an 
absentee God ^^ is an abdicated Sovereign of the 
universe. Voluntarily vacating or forcibly de- 
throned, the world is, on this theory, now a world 
without a God. English Deism was only another 
name for atheism for the present. No wonder it 
passed away ; the wonder is that it ever had such 



64 Christianity Supernatural 

sway. A God whose hands are tied, whose ear is 
stopped, whose heart is stolid, and w^hose might is 
bound — a God whose very Deity is so divested of 
its Godhead as to render him as unresponsive and 
as helpless to his creatures^ need as are the idols of 
Bangkok or Peking — such a God is, whether by 
reason of his own choice at the beginning or of 
the strength of laws which he has ordained, sim- 
ply less than God, and the throne of the Supreme 
is an " untenanted throne ^^ at the very best. 

Christianity stands or falls with its miracles. 
Minus miracles, it would be revised into some- 
thing else absolutely unlike its real self. Miracles 
presuppose the supernatural ; and the supernatu- 
ral, as men understand the term, would not be 
complete without miracles. The one is the cause, 
the other the effect. The one is the substance, the 
other the manifestation ; the one is the powder, the 
other its sign. 

Scripture nowhere defines a miracle. Every 
writer is at liberty to construct his own definition. 
One would scarcely make "supernatural^^ and 
" miraculous ^^ synonymous terms. The miracle 
of apologetics is something visible, tangible, in the 
field of observed fact. SauFs conversion was su- 
pernatural ; but most writers, purely for considera- 
tions of convenience and clearness of speech, would 
not call it miraculous. " Moral miracles '^ are due 



Miracles 6 5 

to supernatural workings, but we shall understand 
ourselves better if we avoid the ambiguous phrase. 
No miracde is immoral or unmoral. The new 
birth is due to the Spirit of God ; sanctification 
has in it a supernatural element ; these have in 
them very valuable evidences for the truth of 
Christianity, but it is better to consider them else- 
where and to confine ourselves now to miracles as 
phenomena in the outward world, due to the im- 
mediate efficiency of God and unsusceptible of 
explanation upon any basis of natural order or 
physical law. 

Such a miracle is something more than the un- 
usual or the strange. A snowflake might be a 
marvel to a prince within the tropics, or a steam- 
engine to a chief of the Dakotahs. Their igno- 
rance pronounces these '' miracles.^^ Then why 
may not our ignorance pronounce floating axes 
and rising dead men miracles? Our knowledge, 
rather, pronounces them so. If in some other 
zone it should be found that iron floats on water, 
and buried dead men rise up and live, in accord- 
ance with laws as commonly observed and as well 
understood as those by which we understand the 
falling of the snowflake and the structure of the 
locomotive, then indeed we should cease to call 
them miracles. But is it so ? Can it be so ? Is 
it believable ? Is the assured knowledge of modern 
science only worthy to be compared with the crass 

5 



66 Christianity Supernatural 

ignorance of the untutored savage ? Then agnos- 
ticism is the death doom of intellectual achieve- 
ment, and the more we think we know the more 
dense and extensive is our ignorance. The norm 
is not simply in our notion ; it is rather in the ob- 
served uniformity. If snowflakes were, all over 
the world, as absolutely unknown as they are 
on sea levels at the equator, then perhaps w^e 
should call a few snowflakes, falling in the midst 
of the centuries, miracles ; only, we should in- 
quire also into the occasion or the reason for a 
miracle at about the time when the crystal visitor 
should silently fall. And so the Duke of Argyll, 
with others, argues that, as only a dozen snow- 
flakes from creation to doomsday would be formed 
and would fall by reason of the same laws and 
forces in nature that now carpet the continents 
and cap the mountain peaks with white so lavishly 
that millions forget that there is anything wonder- 
ful in it all, therefore we should be slow to deny 
that the unusual events we now call miracles may 
not also be explained by certain laws of nature — 
if only we knew enough to know these unknown 
laws of nature. This view has in it a supposition 
which, it must be confessed, is not easy categori- 
cally to refute. Whatever plausibility it has is 
borrowed from the inexhaustible resources of our 
ignorance. It would be audacious to pronounce 
this view incompatible w^ith Christianity. The 



Miracles 6t 

greatest objection to it is its severe draft upon our 
credulity. Of course, just one snowflake might 
have been formed as the myriads of myriads are 
formed. That one snowflake, though, would 
never have furnished a suflBcient basis for be- 
lieving in a law. We never generalize from one 
such observation and christen our generalization a 
uniform law. It takes two points to fix the direc- 
tion of a straight line, and it takes many facts in 
nature to fix our faith in a regular uniform law. 
Would it not be more rational to call the one or 
the few snowflakes exceptions to a law, which law 
ground out something else than snowflakes ? In- 
deed, that is the very element which makes it so 
conspicuous. The law is otherwise, and the 
miraculum is something for which the law does 
not account. All iron axes sink in water, ordi- 
narily; that is the law. Here is one ax that 
does not sink in water; it has another law, we 
are told. The fact is thus admitted, and another 
law is posited. When living beings die, their 
bodies decompose and decay; that is the law. 
We call it a law of chemistry. Eighteen hun- 
dred years ago, that decomposing process was 
arrested in a few cases, under conditions that have 
notably interested all mankind. In these few 
cases, we are told, another law was in operation, 
bringing about these'most unusual and extraordi- 
nary results. To many of us, this increases the 



68 Christianity Supernatural 

diiBculties. We predicate unknown laws upon 
single and singular manifestations. The system 
of nature is made to have two sets of laws : the 
one, the object of our science ; the other, the crea- 
tion of our nescience. This notion seats another 
ruler on the throne of the universe, and the new 
monarches name is Law. It pushes faith on into 
credulousness, and all to pay our tribute to the 
" reign of Law/^ It is the offspring of a certain 
philosophical predilection. 

There is no doubt that the conquests of knowl- 
edge are curtailing the ranges of superstition. Ig- 
norant tribes ascribe to supernatural personages 
what enlightened men trace to nature's laws. But 
there is a line beyond which this march can never 
go, beyond which there is a residuum of the 
mysterious which science gives no promise of re- 
solving. God rules on both sides of that line. 
On this side, he ordinarily works by law. On that 
side, he may or may not ; mortal wisdom cannot 
know. Infinite Wisdom never works at random 
or by chance. Rational laws, we may reverently 
believe, govern all his ways and works among his 
creatures. But the cosmos is an objective scheme 
of uniform actions in accordance with fixed laws. 
The bounds of that cosmos are for us fixed by the 
actions we can perceive and the uniformities we can 
apprehend. 

Dr. Martineau somewhere says, in substance, 



Miracles 69 

that it is always the case that *^ when people find 
out how a thing is done, they instinctively conclude 
that God does not do it." The believer in miracles 
maintains that God has sometimes acted without 
disclosing the how in the way of a uniform mode 
of action. As to the existence of such a law in a 
miracle, most believers are very skeptical; believers 
and unbelievers are at least agnostic. It is gratui- 
tous to affirm the existence of a law according to 
which the one ax floated, the Galilsean w^ater once 
^^ blushed into wine/^ the dead man in the tomb at 
Bethany once rose from the dead. We prefer to 
say that the God, who ordinarily works according 
to uniform law, suspended that law in each such 
instance. We prefer to ascribe these most remark- 
able events rather to the direct volition and action 
of Him whose w'ill makes law and can unmake it 
at His pleasure, rather than to assume new laws 
on bases which the suspicious eye of science would 
elsewhere certainly regard as insufficient, and all 
to bind the powders of God in the all-restraining 
fetters of the world's vicegerent, Law. 

The biblical conception of miracles may be 
gathered from some of the leading terms em- 
ployed to designate them. In the Old Testament 
it is (1) something separated from other things, i. e., 
something singular, uncommon, obviously distin- 
guished from the common run of things. (2) It 



70 Christianity Supernatural 

is a sign to confirm some teaching or pretension. 
(3) It is a power, the cause being put for the effect, 
and the supernatural efficiency, whose manifesta- 
tion it is, being brought to the front. 

In the New Testament it is (1) a wonder. Here 
the name is taken from the astonishment produced 
in the beholder's mind. We have adopted the 
Latin equivalent, miraculum. Archbishop Trench 
has observed that it is a pity that both the German 
and English languages have seized upon a subordi- 
nate phase of the New Testament idea of miracle 
at the expense of more essential elements. It may 
astonish the observer, but to stop there is to lose 
its highest ethical effect upon the spectator and its 
deepest spiritual significance in the Christian sys- 
tem. (2) It is a sign. This indispensable signa- 
tory element attests its connection with and produc- 
tion by the supernatural. It exists not in itself 
nor for its own sake, but for the sake of something 
else. It marks the insignia of Heaven's royalty, 
it is the sign-manual of the ever-living God. (3) 
It is a power, mighty works, or simply tvorks. It 
may astonish weak men, but it is the easy, natural 
activity of Omnipotence. Supernatural works are 
but the natural doings of the supernatural Worker. 

In the light of all this, he is a poor defender of 
Christianity who does not regard miracles as events 
in the outside world, cognizable by the senses of 
men. 



Miracles 71 

Nor^ again, is he a better who regards a miracle 
as a mere haphazard or disconnected thing. The 
power of miracles is not subject to the spirit of 
the prophets or to the whim of the apostles. The 
question in hand settles down to the question of a 
revelation of God to man. A miracle is an occa- 
sional shining through the veil of natural uni- 
formity of the divine Presence and Power, in a 
way out of the ordinary, to seal certain teachings 
and to accomplish certain ends. That first miracle 
at Cana, Jesus did ^^and manifested forth his glorj", 
and his disciples believed on him." These words 
give us at once the essential idea of a miracle — 
the showing forth of the glorious God, and the 
evidential import which it involves — that men may 
believe. Every miracle is, in its way, a theophany ; 
in its way, strikingly unusual, obviously percepti- 
ble, and significantly suggestive of a permanent, 
controlling, powerful Personality who can and 
does do as he wills. 

It is not necessary to delineate accurately and 
fully all the elements involved in miracles, in order 
to bring out their evidential force. This attesting 
significance, however, is essential. If it were lack- 
ing, a miracle^ would be a chance event; but one 
stray chance event argues a universe of chance, 

^ Miraculu7n, in itself a little thing, parceled off from the 
whole of nature. 



72 Christianity Supernatural 

and, in such a universe, a miracle is inconceivable. 
The coincidence of a fact with an occasion is the 
core of the miraculum^ the little thing. The fact 
itself, however oiitre, is not enough. The claim 
itself, however plausible, is not enough. The one 
certifies the other, and in turn is interpreted by it. 
There is no denying that the Scriptures and his- 
torical Christianity have laid great stress upon these 
miracles as proofs of the truth of the Christian re- 
ligion. Moreover, without dispute, our Lord re- 
peatedly did the same. Early apologetics accord- 
ingly made much of the ^' external evidences," 
and yet it has so happened that these very miracles, 
while supposed to prove Christianity true, have had 
to be proven true themselves. Some have said that, 
instead of easing the burden of the truth, they 
have made that burden very much heavier to be 
borne. Tliis idea has been quite in favor latterly. 
Not a few make bold to say that Christianity 
would be more easily defensible without than with 
its miracles — forgetting, to be sure, that, as we 
have seen, Christianity without its miracles is not 
Christianity. Mr. Froude, and many of his stamp, 
insist very strongly upon this view. Matthew 
Arnold, in his memorable remark that, if the pen 
in his hand should be immediately turned into a 
penwiper, it would not make the sentiment he was 
writing one whit more true, meant to emphasize 
the same idea. It is almost incredible that such a 



Miracles 73 

man as Mr. Arnold should have allowed himself to 
make such an observation. What an utterly childish 
view of a miracle ! How like that of the " Phil- 
istines '^ whom he is so fond of soundly trouncing ! 
He could not have imagined a better illustration 
of what Christian miracles are not Was it not 
just such a sign which the Pharisees and the Sad- 
ducees sought^ and did not the great Miracle- 
Worker brand such sign-seekers as ^^ a wicked and 
adulterous generation ^^? 

Rationalism haughtily declares that no sensible 
phenomenon can be accepted as a note or proof of 
a spiritual truth. One writer has gone so far as to 
say : ^^ If miracles were, in the estimation of a 
former age, among the chief supports of Chris- 
tianity, they are at present among the main diffi- 
culties and hindrances to its acceptance.^^ ^ Sin 
and salvation, God and holiness, are essentially 
true, and nothing outside of them is relevant as 
testimony to their truth. In this way it has come 
about that not the opponents of Christianity only 
but also many who are in sympathy with its teach- 
ings and who even stand as champions of its truth, 
distinctly disparage miracles and regard them rather 
as impedimenta than as w^eapons in its warfare with 
unbelief. 

It is more than possible that the conceded ele- 
ment of truth in this view has received undue 

^ Powell's Study of the Evidences of Christianity/^ p. 140. 



74 Christianity Supernatural 

emphasis, as a reaction and result from a perver- 
sion of the proper function of miracles in the 
scale of Christian evidence. Of course, an ab- 
stract truth is not made more or less true by any 
extraneous circumstance whatever. But an ab- 
stract truth, taking form in historic fact, may 
evince or evidence itself as true by means of 
certain germane and appropriate phenomena in 
the sensible world, whose occurrence and occasion 
and significance are made utterly pointless, inex- 
plicable, contradictory, except on the assumption 
of that abstract truth which they sign and seal. 
The principles of the atonement are abstract and 
eternal, but Calvarv with its cross reveals and 
confirms them. Immortality is an abstraction, 
but the resurrection of Jesus made it not more 
true, but more evident. ^' God is love,'^ and it is 
no abuse of language to say that his unspeakable 
gift proves it. It is the distinguishing feature of 
Christianity that its abstract doctrines are con- 
vertible into historic truth. The doctrine of the 
incarnation has its man Jesus, Immanuel ; love 
has its cross, immortality its first Easter morning, 
spiritual power its Pentecost, and sanctification its 
elect saints. 

A truth revealed is a truth made concrete. A 
God who eternally hides himself would leave 
his darkened creatures a race of atheists. No 
heavens would declare his glory, no firmament 



Miracles 75 

show forth his handiwork. Salvation from sin 
means power to save ; but potential power that is 
always only potential is an abstraction and cannot 
be known to be a fact. Every fact in gospel 
history is luminous w^th its gospel meaning. 
The doubting Thomas is not asked to believe 
simply the fact that Jesus rose from the dead ; he 
is to believe that Jesus was such a man as could 
and did rise from the dead. 

There is nothing forced or strained about the 
miracles of the canon. Indeed, it were strange 
if there were no miracles. If hypnotism or 
occultism or evolution should demonstrate Bible 
miracles to be natural, the next step the demon- 
strator would take would be to call for some real 
evidence that Christianity is divine. But if 
Jesus Christ was divine, we should expect his life 
to be tuned accordingly. Granted a Shakespeare, 
we expect Shakespearean prodigies in his writings ; 
granted a Napoleon, we expect Napoleonic strata- 
gems in his career ; granted a Lincoln, we expect 
the quaint sayings and wise doings of a Lincoln ; 
granted a Christ — in thought, in aim, in spirit, 
far above the levels of mankind — we expect a 
life, a work, a death, Christlike. Divine doings 
are the things we easily expect at the hands of 
One who himself is divine. 

If Jesus was not divine, his attested miracles 



76 Christianity Supernatural 

multiply the aiysteries of his life. It is as good 
history as that Rome fell^ that he both did mira- 
cles and that he said he did them. Others, before 
and since, did wonders by a power they distinctly 
disclaimed as their own; he did them by his 
own power. That power simply worked; his 
easy control of nature's forces was displayed, his 
normal superhuman selfhood simply acted, and 
miracles were recorded as the result. Not simply 
to prove himself divine did he work miracles, 
but because he was divine ; and now they prove 
it. He would have been less than himself if he 
had done less than he did. Every man's life is 
his character in terms of linear measurement. 
Goethe says ; " Man can never know how anthro- 
pomorphic he is.'' He is all man-like, in spite 
of himself. Christ was Christomorphic — Christ- 
like ; he was Himself, 

Not merely is the great doctrine of the incarna- 
tion vindicated to the reason by the angelic chorus 
heralding the approaching birth to the Judsean 
shepherds as they watched their flocks by night ; 
not merely are the eternal truths of atonement for 
sin sealed by the historical death and resurrection 
of the Son of Mary ; not merely is his sovereignty 
in the realm of nature proved to the world by his 
calming the lake storm or turning the water into 
wine ; not merely is the precious teaching that sin 
may be forgiven by the sinless Man of history 



Miracles 77 

clinched by his bidding the paralytic sinner take 
up his bed and walk : but also — and chiefly, if you 
please — the recorded fact that the strange portent 
announced at midnight to the astonished shepherds 
was followed by the birth at Betiilehem as it had 
been foretold ; the admitted fact that Jesus did die 
as he himself predicted, with explanations of his 
death that the manner of it verified, and that he 
did rise from the dead as he said he would, while 
yet his hearers w^ere too dull and doubting to 
catch the meaning of his words; the fact that, 
again and again, with no apparent difficulty, but 
more easily than the expert does his work in his 
laboratory, he did quiet storms, multiply loaves, 
heal the sick, and raise the dead ; the historical fact 
that the palsied man did take up his bed and 
walk, at that particular moment, in obedience to 
that particular command, and coincident with that 
particular conversation concerning his power to 
forgive sin — all this assuredly does make it evi- 
dent that this strange and anomalous Person is 
most explicable upon the simple presumption that 
what he said about himself is true, and that, in 
the light of his own plain and sober teachings, too 
noble for an impostor and too sane for a fanatic, 
it is easier to believe him to be the promised 
Messiah, the incarnate Logos, than anything else 
which impartial reason can pronounce concerning 
him. 



78 Christianity Supernatural 

It is not intended to deny that the miracles of 
Bible history had a distinctly telic or purposive 
value. Their purpose was undisguisedly evi- 
dential — they were '^ signs/^ They proved some- 
thing to be true. Shakespeare's productions prove 
Shakespeare's genius ; Jesus' doings prove Jesus' 
divinity, and they were intended so to prove. 
The miracles of Jesus were a concession to the 
weakness of the human reason. Thomas saw and 
believed ; blessed are they that have not seen and 
yet have believed ! The proud intellect of the 
world may decline such a concession, but the 
humble seeker after truth finds in this that which 
makes it most Christian, most Christlike, most 
divine. Christ ^^came not to call the righteous, 
but sinners to repentance." '^ They that be 
whole need not a physician, but they that are 
sick." Possibly the unfallen seraphim need not 
the miracles that convinced the doubt of a 
Thomas ; but then, Christianity is not for unfallen 
seraphim. If the miracles are a concession, salva- 
tion is a concession, the cross is a concession, Jesus 
Christ is a concession, Christianity is a concession. 

It is indeed unseemly that, when God conde- 
scends to our low estate, we should haughtily 
spurn his condescension. 

John Foster says : " Miracles are the great bell 
of the universe, which draws men to God's sermon." 



Miracles 79 

Rather, they are a part of the sermon . Still, the 
bell is not for its own sake ; it rouses the iudiflfer- 
ent and reminds the forgetful. Yielding to its 
kindly call, men come and receive the richer bless- 
ings of eternal life. But some there are who spurn 
these bells as a harsh interruption of their quiet 
reflections upon the truth itself. " Miracles/^ they 
say, '' are merely the bells to call primitive peoples 
to church. Sweet as the music they once made, 
modern ears find them jangling and out of tune, 
and their dissonant notes scare away pious souls 
who would fain enter the temple of worship." ^ 

'' You stick a garden-plot with ordered twigs, 
To show inside lie germs of herbs unborn, 
And check the careless step Avould spoil their birth ; 
But when herbs wave, the guardian twigs may go. 
. . . This book's fruit is plain, 
Nor miracles need prove it any more. ' ' ^ 

And so Christianity has educated men away from 
itself! Its miracles are only for the kindergarten 
stage of faith ! They are crutches to be thrown 
away after men have learned by the use of them to 
walk alone ! Can it be that Christianity is of God, 
and that its Author made a mistake ? Can it be 
that in this age of intellectual achievement, this 
age of reason, the method of Infinite Wisdom, in 
revealing its truth to men, is out of date or has 

* Pres. Schurman's Agnosticism and Religion^ p. 51. 

2 See Dr. John Watson's The Mi7idof the Master^ p. 146. 



80 Christianity Supernatural 

goue amiss? If Goethe meant it when he said 
that miracle is faith's own dearest child, then is 
faith's maturity to be signalized by the sorest be- 
reavement it can know ? Are the pedagogics of 
Jesus obsolete, and are miracles indeed scare- 
crows to nineteenth-century inquirers after truth? 
Has the world outgrown the Christianity of the 
New Testament — the Christianity of Christ ? Has 
the moral tone of mankind so advanced as to re^ 
quire no ^^ bells'' to summon them to the oracles 
of truth, to attract them through their senses to 
the lofty verities that are above the sway of sense, 
and to win them to the Holy Temple where the 
Most High condescends to reveal himself to all 
who would worship him in spirit and in truth ? 



The seat of law is the bosom of God, and the voice of 
law is the harmony of the world. — Hooker. 

If the merit of the order of nature lies in its use, there 
is no reason why it should not be suspended if there is use 
in suspending it. — Mozley. 

The loose and unscientific use of this single term (evolu- 
tion) has done as much as any other single cause to intro- 
duce error into current theories of nature, of man, and of 
human history. — Shedd. 

Shalt thou give law to God ? Shalt thou dispute with 
him the points of liberty? Who made thee what thou art, 
and formed the powers of heaven such as he pleased, and 
circumscribed their being?— Milton. 

6 81 



CHAPTER VI 

THE RIGHT OF MIRACLES TO OCCUR 

The stock objection to miracles is that they 
are impossible. This is not an argument or an 
evidence, but an ipse dixit. David Friedrich 
Strauss, in his famous first edition of his Leben 
Jesu, laid down these three principles in substance 
as fundamental: 1. The supernatural is unhis- 
torical. 2. The unpsychological is impossible. 
3. When there are two discrepant accounts of the 
same event, both are untrustworthy. This has at 
least the merit of being very clear. Others have 
accepted these principles, but have been less candid 
in avowing them. The first is virtual atheism ; 
the second is another way of putting the first, and 
the third is utter nonsense and was simply meant 
to sweep the New Testament out of court. 

To call miracles impossible is to beg the whole 
question. What would be thought of that court 
which is about to try a man for crime, and, while 
the man is awaiting trial and the advocates and 
witnesses are ready to proceed, the judge estops 
the whole proceeding with the remark, ^' It is im- 

83 



84 Christianity Supernatural 

possible that this man should be a criminal " ? Or 
what would be thought if the attorney for the ac- 
cused should rise^ and^ without waiting to ask or 
move that the case be dismissed^ announce in au- 
thoritative manner that his client did not commit 
the crime of which he was accused, he could not 
have committed it or any other crime, because it is 
impossible that any man should commit any crime f 
This may be an easy way of dispensing justice, 
but it is a certain way of dispensing with justice. 
This is the system of jurisprudence by which the 
question of miracles is settled by the dictum that 
the supernatural is impossible. It shuts off all 
evidence. It is dogmatism gone mad. Only 
supernatural intelligence could absolutely affirm 
the impossibility of the supernatural. Dogmatic 
agnosticism means omniscience assumed, and dog- 
matic antisupernaturalism poses in the role of the 
very thing which it denies. 

It is the important duty of the historian to 
deal with facts, but it is the transcendent office of 
the philosopher to deal with possibilities. The 
latter is too serenely exalted to be vexed with 
paltry questions of evidence. He confines his 
august powers to " high priori '^ paths, and smiles, 
with an imperial smile of pity, at the naive folly 
of those W'ho innocently w^ait for facts before they 
formulate their conclusions. 

Theology is often credited with the lion's share 



The Right of Miracles to Occur 85 

of dogmatism^ but really this is unapproachable. 
Not content with callino; us mistaken in believino; 
that there ever has been a miracle, it calls us 
idiots for believing that there ever could have 
been one. 

Begging the pardon of our contented philosopher, 
we must still maintain that the question of miracles 
is at least an open one. Mr. Froude is entirely 
fair in saying: "The question about miracles is 
simply one of evidence — whether in any given 
case the proof is so strong that no room is left for 
mistake, exaggeration, or illusion, while more evi- 
dence is required to establish a fact antecedently 
improbable than is sufficient for a common occur- 
rence.^^ ^ 

It is best frankly to admit that the presumption 
in each particular case is in favor of the natural. 
It is easier to believe in the sample than in the 
exception. We are now not philosophers, but 
historians, and so we are not rising to consider the 
great truth that with man as is man, with the 
world as is the world, and w^th God as we know 
him, there is indeed an indisputable antecedent 
probability that God w^ould rive the clouds and 
make himself manifest to his distressed crea- 
tures ; w^e are only saying that, in considering the 
evidence that any event is miraculous, that evi- 

1 Short Studies on Great Subject s^ i : 187. 



86 Christianity Supernatural 

dence must be sufficient to overcome a just and 
decided presumption in the mind to the contrary. 
Nature, by its usual modes, has taught us to ex- 
pect those modes. We are surprised at anything 
else, and Dean Mozely truly tells us there is 
always an element of doubt in surprise. The 
miracle is something strange ; that is one thing 
tjiat makes it a miracle. It astonishes the be- 
holder, and it is preposterous to say that the pre- 
sumption, in every specific instance in a thousand, 
is in favor of that one being the one exception 
rather than one of the remaining nine hundred 
and ninety-nine. All other axes have sunk in 
water, and the presumption is that the prophet's 
ax did likewise. Wheat has been sown in the 
earth, has grown and been harvested and gathered 
and garnered and ground and baked into bread 
for thousands of years, and the probability is that 
all bread has been made in that same way. That 
Jesus multiplied the loaves to feed the hungry 
multitude needs strong proof, or it is right to 
reject it. 

The uniformity of nature, then, does not dis- 
prove miracles ; it only throws the burden of 
proof against them. Mr. Hume was right thus 
far. He insisted that the testimony for miracles 
must be so strong that its falsehood would be 
more incredible than the miracle to which it testi- 
fies. It comes down to miracle against miracle. 



The Right of Miracles to Occur 87 

Very well! That is not so unfair, after all. 
Only, Mr. Hume immediately proceeds to remark 
that no such testimony exists. Without stating 
and weighing the evidence at all, it was Hume 
the philosoplier, and not Hume the historian, who 
decided the question at last. He did discuss the 
alleged miracles of Vespasian in Egypt, and Car- 
dinal de Retz in Spain, and at the tomb of Abbe 
Paris in France; he considered the evidence in 
one case and proceeded to pass judgment upon 
another case. '' It is nothing strange, I hope, 
that men should lie in all ages.^^ Any man w^ho 
could write that might well regard true testimony 
as so ^' strange ^^ that he might at least '^ hope^^ it 
to be incredible. We are to bear in mind, though, 
that while uniformity raises a presumption against 
exceptions, that uniformity is a necessary condition 
to the exceptions. The exception proves the rule 
in this, that if there w^ere no rule to be broken, 
there could be no exception by breaking it. 
Nature's uniformity is presupposed in the miracle. 
We have no objection to offer to any proper 
argument in showing nature's methods regular 
and uniform, for such argument is only establish- 
ing one of the conditiones sine qua non of the miracle 
itself. It is because ordinary events are ordinary 
that extraordinary events have any peculiar signifi- 
cance. Without the normal, there can be no ab- 
normal ; without the common, there can be no 



88 Christianity Supernatural 

uncommon ; without the natural, there could be 
no supernatural. 

But as to the protest that it is unreasonable to 
believe in miracles, something remains to be said. 
The objector often means that man's belief in the 
order of nature is so universal and so powerful 
that it is irrational to believe in anything whatso- 
ever which does not take its place in that order. 

It will not escape notice that this view still 
keeps the question remote from the region of fact. 
It is rather psychological, philosophical, than sci- 
entific or historical. 

But where do we get this belief in the order 
of nature? Does an event not classable among 
the ordinary events of nature so outrage our reason 
as to make the belief in it irrational? To believe 
twice two to be five would be, in this sense, irra- 
tional. To believe that a curved line traces a 
shorter distance between two points than a straight 
line, would also. Is believing in a black swan or 
a floating rock in the same sense irrational ? Is 
faith in any fact that is not orderly or ordinary 
absolutely unreasonable? Not at all. What we 
call the order of nature is believed in upon alto- 
gether different grounds from those on which we 
accept mathematical axioms. We gather our ideas 
of nature from experience, but we do not call 
what is at variance with our experience so unrea- 



The Right of 3Iirades to Occw 89 

sonable that upon the good word of others we 
cannot believe it, aUhoiigh we have never ex- 
perienced it. Unless we are out-and-out empiri- 
cists — and we are not, — unless w^ith John Stuart 
jNIill we hold that every man, in his ow^n individ- 
ual experience, has accumulated his entire stock 
of codes and creeds; or unless, with Herbert 
Spencer, we avail ourselves of heredity and sim- 
ply extend our own experience into that of the 
race ; then we must admit that there is a world 
of difference between the ground of our faith in 
the straight-line axiom and our belief that water 
invariably tends to go in straight lines to its lowest 
level. Even Spencer and Mill bring no relief, for 
so far are they from holding that our faith in the 
laws of nature is raised to the dignity of our faith 
in what we call necessary truth, they, that on the 
other hand, lower the latter to the level of the 
former. Accordingly, for them there can be noth- 
ing so ironclad about the laws of nature. Those 
laws are simply what they have found, just as, 
they say, everything else is. We say that in this 
they are right so far as the laws of nature are 
concerned, and wrong beyond that. They see 
facts only ; necessary truths are forbidden. This 
is why Mr. Balfour has truly said, " Pure em- 
piricism has therefore no claim to be a philoso- 
pliy^^;^ by which he means that, content with 
^ The Foundations of Beliefs p. 161. 



90 Christianity Supernatural 

taking what they fiud and stopping there^ the idea 
of a philosophy with laws of thought transcending 
experience is absurd. 

What we believe is this^ namely, that our belief 
in some things — things we cannot but believe — is 
not derived from our experience, and that our be- 
lief in the uniformity or continuity of the observed 
laws of nature is derived from our experience. 
The former belief is reasonable in the sense that 
to disbelieve those things is irrational. Sane men 
cannot disbelieve them. The latter belief is rea- 
sonable in the sense that it is inferred from observed 
facts, and that, wanting those facts, the belief could 
be suspended without any violence whatever to the 
constitution of our reason or to the organic laws of 
our thought. We have no reason for believing that 
the sun will rise in the east to-morrow morning, 
or that it will rise at all, except that we know that 
it has been for a very long time rising every morn- 
ing, and rising in the east. AVe have no other 
reason for believing that water will always fall to 
its lowest possible level than that, so far as we know, 
it always has done so. It would not throw our 
thought processes fatally out of gear if water should 
change its habits and do something else. Indeed, 
we need only to heat it above the boiling point or 
cool it below the freezing point, and it does do 
something else; and yet we think and infer and 



Tlie Right of Miracles to Occur 91 

believe in the same way in sultry July and in 
frigid January. 

Science first observes and then infers. It is easy 
to let the inferrino' come in before the observino;. 
Science sees what is ; it studies phenomena. When 
it comes into the Most Holy Place of the general- 
izingj law-formulating philosopher^ mere science is 
" healthily agnostic.^^ 

To observe the present regime of nature^ there- 
fore^ and^ flushed with enthusiasm at its triumphs, 
to turn and declare that nothing has ever happened, 
nothing ever will happen, nothing can happen, 
which is different from what it has found has 
happened — this is too unscientific for true science, 
too unphilosophical for true philosophy. This is 
induction ; induction is really only expectation, ex- 
pectation based on probabilities, but a universe of 
probabilities does not amount to a necessity. To- 
morrow will probably come as to-day came. It 
may not. It is improbable that it will not; but 
the improbable is not the impossible, the self- 
contradictory — otherwise time is eternal and the 
succession of days and nights can never end. 
Coleridge says : '' Like the stern lights of a ship, 
experience illuminates only the track over which 
it has passed/^ Prof. Huxley has spoken on this 
point, and this is what he says in discussing gravi- 
tation as a law of nature according to which some 



92 Christianity Supernatural 

have said stones must fall to the ground : '^ But 
wlien^ as commonly happens, we change SvilP into 
' must/ we introduce an idea of necessity which 
has no warrant in the observed facts ; and has no 
warranty that I can] observe elsewhere. For my 
part, I utterly repudiate and anathematize the 
intruder. Fact I know and law I know, but 
what is this necessity but an empty shadow of the 
mind^s own throwing? ^^^ 

Mr. Buckle says that the aim of science is to 
predict the future. The value of its predictions 
must always be contingent upon the perpetuity 
of the methods which it finds to be in vogue. 
How long they will continue, neither Mr. Buckle 
nor any other man can say. Science excuses her- 
self from announcing that they are eternal. Lord 
Kelvin has told us that the sun's heat is slowly 
dying out and that the present astronomic clock 
gives promise of one day running down. Even 
Mr. Spencer's cycle theory of alternating evolutions 
and dissolutions implies a lapse of the whole pres- 
ent cosmic order. Nor is science altogether silent. 
She may be summoned to testify that, from the 
best of her knowledge and belief, the laws of na- 
ture are not quite so rigidly uniform as some make 
out. Geology reveals tremendous upheavals as 
well as prolonged epochs of gradual growth. 

^ Lay Sermons^ p. 158. 



The Right of Miracles to Occur 93 

Biology — or, as President Jordan prefers to call it, 
" bionomics '^ — reveals hiatuses which the most 
ardent evolutionist has hardly been able to account 
for. If matter is not eternal, there was an abrupt 
break when the worlds were made. Science repu- 
diates spontaneous generation, and when tliose first 
vital germs appeared there was a breach in the 
order of the uniform. Mr. Spencer tries to show 
that it was so easy for the inorganic to slide (up- 
ward) into the organic, that, before it knew it, the 
slip had been made. The great philosopher nodded 
long enough to mistake ease for efficiency — because 
it was so easy to do it, it just did it; and wise 
men are smiling at the audacity of his fancy. 
Uniformity fails to explain the very things that 
need explaining. If it ever began, it broke its own 
record, and so it may break it again eo facto in the 
ending. Science says it is not eternal, either ante 
or 2J0st, Uniformity tells us " how,^^ and even that 
only for the present. It answ^ers to the reason^s 
^^Why?^^ nothing which makes it irrational or 
impossible to believe in things which it cannot 
provide for. It dare not say these minds of ours 
cannot think and feel and choose in other worlds 
than this, in other realms than this where now we 
find that iron axes sink in water and lifeless bodies 
return into their formless dust. 

Uniformity fails to explain the emerging of the 
vegetable from the inorganic, of the animal from 



94 Christianity Supernatural 

the vegetable, of the rational and moral from the 
animal. In the world of character, spontaneous 
regeneration is as unknown as spontaneous gener- 
ation in the world of nature. Omne vivum ex vivo^ 
The life of the Christian man, the life of Jesus 
Christ, is utterly inexplicable on the basis of the 
uniform action of their antecedents. ^' When sci- 
ence can produce bacteria from ammonia and 
water, change any lower creature into a responsible 
being, construct a Christ out of a man consciously 
guilty, then and only then can she afford to speak 
slightingly of miracles.^^ ^ 

1 Dr. A. H. Strong's Philosophy and Religion ^ p. 142. 



One of the impossibilities is, having made man free, to 
compel him to act as if he were necessitated. — Fairbairn. 

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and tra- 
vaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but 
ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even 
we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adop- 
tion, to wit, the redemption of our body. — St. Paxil. 

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at 
every step, and the substitution for it of another which may 
be called the ethical process. — Huxley. 

The incarnation discovers to man the greatness of his 
misery by the greatness of the remedy that has been neces- 
sary. — Pascal. 

The development of the world is in many ways so abnor- 
mal, so disturbed, that just on account of this abnormity, 
caused by the breaking in of sin, a healing and restoring 
interference on the part of God evidently becomes necessary. 
— Christlieb. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE POSITIVE ARGUMENT FOR MIRACLES 

It has been fully admittecP that^ to the mere 
observer of facts, the presumption is in favor of 
the ordinary. The fact of uniformity trains the 
mind to expect it to continue, and, without ques- 
tion, the regularities discovered by science beget a 
sort of mental prejudice against the irregular. 

But there is another standpoint than that of 
the scientific observer. The annals of nature are 
scant basis for the vaticinations of the prophet. 
Wider horizons embrace factors hitherto unseen, 
that bid fair to disturb the nice balancings of the 
past. The insect of a summer may die with the 
notion that all atmospheres are hot. The lands- 
man of the interior may imagine the ocean to be 
but a large river, like that on the banks of which 
his life has been spent. Nor is a wider experi- 
ence alone the corrector of the crude inferences of 
our ignorance. The astronomer sees a different 
sky from that of the savage ; he may predict an 
eclipse, in every detail of time and procession, 
wholly unlike any ever beheld by the eye of man 

1 P. 85. 

97 



98 Christianity Supernatural 

in the past. The evolution cycles of an agnostic 
philosophy certainly are not the teachings of the 
agnostic^s experience. Unless we make the future 
the duplicate of the past, change must be the order 
of the days to come. 

There is a view of the subject of miracles which 
throws all the presumption in their favor. That 
view is fair, necessary, and absolutely true. The 
Christian's faith in the supernatural has been so 
vigorously attacked that it has assumed the atti- 
tude or habit of fighting wholly on the defensive. 
It has been trained to the idea that it can go 
nowhere without carrying its proof in its hand, 
ready for presentation upon prompt and unavoid- 
able demand. But miracles have a higher evi- 
dence. They need take no crouching attitude be- 
fore men's reason. They are the corollaries of 
great truths which men have difficulty in de- 
clining to believe. Their claims are positive. 
Their evidence is not simply neutral or negative ; 
and, seen from higher and true standpoints, they 
command the assent and compel the faitli of 
thoughtful men. 

Tertullian called sin the *^ great interloper.'' 
Every human being who opens his eyes to look 
about him or within him knows that there is 
something wrong. The very word '' wrong " car- 



The Positive Argument for Miracles 99 

ries in it the truth that things have been wrung or 
twisted out of plumb. 



'The time is out of joint : O cursed spite^ 
That ever I was born to set it ri«:ht !" 



Hamlet^s ^^time'^ was just like all men's time. 
The very fact that we have ideals higher than our 
achievements proves it. It is not a question for 
argument; everybody knows it, sees it, feels it. 
The cruel heel of man is against the hated ser- 
pent^s head. In sorrow and pain are the generations 
born into the world ; in w^eakness and- struggle do 
they beat their uncertain paths, and in the help- 
lessness of a common mortality do they pass off 
into the great unseen. Thorns and thistles are 
the crops w^hich the accursed earth brings forth, 
and in the sw^eat of his face does man eat his bread 
until unto his native dust he does return. 

The failures of nature are, to the successes, as 
men judge, as thousands to one. It is the excep- 
tional seed that growls into the plant, the favored 
acorn that becomes a spreading oak. Nature's 
fields are beautiful, but they are a beautiful 
slaughterhouse. It is conflict, struggle, competi- 
tion, life or death, kill and eat or starve and die. 
If the world show^s benevolence, it shows malevo- 
lence also ; if there is contriving kindness, there 
is conspiring cruelty too, and we cannot charge 

LofC. 



100 Christianity Supernatural 

Mr. J. S. Mill with entire insincerity in his diffi- 
culties concerning this turning point of his doubt. 

Nor is human history charged with an altogether 
different meaning. War, carnage, intrigue, oppres- 
sion, inhumanity, injustice, deceit, ingratitude — 
these and such as these are enough to give a dark 
coloring to the brightest pictures of the past. The 
best civilizations of antiquity made woman a chat- 
tel, used human slaves as beasts of burden, and 
turned educated, refined men into food for mad 
beasts and fuel for the consuming flames. The 
scenes of sin have not yet disappeared. We thank 
God for the undisputed triumphs of Christianity, 
the mighty victories of the gospel, and they are 
great and many ; but he shouts too soon who imag- 
ines that the cruel ravages of sin have yet ceased 
to blight the race. The writer once heard Mr. 
Spurgeon begin a sermon with this sweeping re- 
mark, ^' The course of our fallen race has been a 
succession of failures/^ followed by perhaps ten 
minutes in a decidedly pessimistic vein. Then, 
pausing to take breath, he burst forth with this 
proposition, '^ All good in human history is marked 
by the interposition of Almighty God f and then 
followed the bright and glowing optimism of 
the gospel. 

We are not anxious just now to call that of 
which we speak sin. The philosopher calls it 
evil ; the jurist calls it crime ; the ethicist calls it 



The Positive Argument for Miracles 101 

vice; the philanthropist calls it infirmity; the 
educator calls it ignorance. The Bible calls it sin^ 
hut it is the thing and not the name we are con- 
sidering, and it is safe to say that there never was 
a time when there was a more unanimous vote that 
the thing exists than to-day. Science looks else- 
where in the dictionary for what the theologian calls 
total depravity, and quickly finds it. Heredity 
makes it a thing of the race, and not simply of the 
individual. The statesman must count on original 
sin, and political economy is sheerest fancy if it 
forgets the cruel reign of self. 

All this is taught by those who interpret it as 
the age-long upward struggle of the evolving and 
emerging human race. We are told that all good 
in man, as he now is, is so much gain above his 
first estate, and that all bad in him is but the 
lingering of the scant moral capital with which he 
began his career. Beginning at the brute, he is 
aiming at the saint, and he is now somewhere 
about the midway point on the tedious journey. 
The civilization of man is but another name for 
the domestication of the beast, and, as we "let the 
ape and tiger die,'^ sanctification proceeds. 

This theory of civilization has very serious pre- 
suppositions. Either the brute w^as a potential 
man before its arrival at manhood, or it was not. 
If it was, then its elevation w^as only the asser- 



102 Christianity Supernatural 

tion of its real nature and was an apparent eleva- 
tion only. Accordingly brutes to-day may be poten- 
tial men^ and the creeds of metempsychosis must be 
adjusted to the Christian's faith ; or, on the other 
hand, if the brute was not a potential man at the 
beginning, either its bruteship had self-changing 
powers of its own — which could hardly be main- 
tained, for we know that the leopard cannot change 
his spots or the Ethiopian his skin — or something 
without the brute ab extra must have changed him. 
That changing something must have been above the 
brute, for transforming forces in the world of char- 
acter are forces that are higher, greater, stronger than 
the things they change. But there was no force, 
according to the hypothesis, in the created world, 
higher than this brute-man still tarrying in the 
dusky twilight of his manhood. Any higher force 
to change him was the force that created him, and 
that is only the evolutionist's interpretation of 
what some of us have called sandification. It is 
from without; it is from above; it works within. 
It saves its object, they say, from brute to man ; 
we say, from sinner to saint. 

Drop the differences just now, and let us note 
the things in common. Stalwart evolutionists do 
not much believe in the sanctifying forces of the 
evolutionary process. Prof. Huxley says there are 
no ethical elements in the cosmical process. '' Evo- 
lution encourages no millennial expectations.'' Be- 



The Positive Argument for Miracles 103 

sides this, he certainly has no very high notion of 
the intrinsic goodness of man, when he tells us that^ 
as to falling in with the Positivistic deification of 
humanity, he would as soon worship a ^Svilder- 
ness of apes.'^ There are few more pessimistic 
passages in all literature than that in which he 
begins with these words : '' I know of no study 
which is so unutterably saddening as that of the 
evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the 
annals of history,'^ and ends with these, ^^The 
best men of the best epochs are simply those who 
make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest 
sins/^ ^ 

Most believers in evolution are not very strenu- 
ous believers in " millennial hopes ^^ born of evolu- 
tion. They see the night, but they are blind to 
any dawn. They see the seething, struggling, 
possibly aspiring mass, but they see neither an 
uplifting force within the mass, nor yet a Force 
without to lift it up. 

The Force without is the only conceivable origin 
whence deliverance from their sin can come to 
men. 

But, we are asked, if God made man in crea- 
tion, and now has to remake him in redemption, 
was not his first creation a failure? If God is 
called upon to restore humanity to the condition 
^ Nineteenth Century^ Feb., 1889. 



104 Christianity Supernatural 

in which God first placed him, but which man 
forfeited and lost, then is not Christianity an effort 
to make the best of a great disappointment ? 

Dr. Johnson once said : '' There are objections 
against a plenum, and objections to a vacuum ; but 
one of them must be true/^ Either there is a 
God who created and controls man, or there is 
not. Certain difficulties face us on the supposi- 
tion that there is ; vastly more and greater difficul- 
ties meet us on the supposition that there is not. 
We must never suppose that every ])osition to 
which can be offered an objection that we are 
unable to answer is consequently false, for there 
may be fewer objections to that than to any other 
position. 

" The sum of all is : Yes, my doubt is great ; 
my faith's still greater : then my faith's enough.'' 
In intellectually weighing evidences upon themes 
high and deep, these words may often describe the 
honest inquirer's frame. 

And yet there are glimpses of relief. We can 
think of the Eternal God contemplating the crea- 
tion of dependent beings. A cold lifeless world is 
but a feeble expression of his holy purpose, his 
divine thought. A universe of sentient beings is a 
higher expression. The highest possible, we may 
dare say, would be species of beings on whom 
his own ineffable being, in image, is impressed. 
That ima^e involves self-consciousness and moral 



The. Positive Argument for 3Iirades 105 

responsibility, the outline marks of similitude in 
the Personality that is divine in God and human 
in us. Moral responsibility involves powers of 
intellection, reflection, decision, volition, choice, 
direction, action. To make his creatures less 
than that is to be content with a universe devoid 
of intelligences able to apprehend the character of 
their Creator ; empty of beings capable by their 
own free will of achieving anything, except as the 
stars in the sky or the cattle in the field can be 
said to achieve; barren of spirits, angelic or 
human, in whose companionship his own Spirit 
could take delight, in whose reciprocal affection 
his own being, which is Love, could find its self- 
communicating and ever-blessed complacency. 

But the creation of such a being has its risks. 
His will is no wnll if it be less than free. As the 
Bampton lecturer for 1894 tersely says: ^^ The 
freedom of the will is the very nerve of person- 
ality.^^ ^ He may go wrong, and with that possi- 
bility is the correlate possibility of his doing 
nobly, grandly, godlikely right. 

'' I made him just and right 
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.'^ 

Such creatures God chose to create and did 
create. That is why we are. The crisis came, 

* Illingivorth- s Personaliiy^ Hinnan and Divine^ p. 227. 



106 Christianity Supernatural 

the dreadful issue followed. We shall not say, 
we cannot say, that God was sorry then that he 
had decided to make man. Here we wade out 
beyond oui: depth. Whence the spirit of evil 
came, or why men sinned, we cannot say. God 
purposed to permit what did occur. Adjusting 
provisions to the fallen state of man, we cannot 
say that salvation was an afterthought with God, 
for his purpose embraced it all. But if sin had 
not come, no salvation would have been needed. 
And so the revelation of his will, the incarnation 
of his Son, the atonement on the cross, and the 
gracious work of his Holy Spirit, are for the 
restoration of man to what he lost. Christianity, 
in one aspect of it, is the means God is using for 
the restoration of Paradise lost, and its work will 
be completed only when Paradise is regained. 
And in the otherwise impossible experiences of a 
once lost but then reclaimed race, and in the other- 
wise impossible manifestations of a God of infinite 
love, tenderness, compassion — in these we catch 
glimpses that are suggestive of a rationale of sin. 

Now, it is too much to say that, since man 
sinned, God was bound to save. Man had his 
chance ; he knew the consequences ; he chose, he 
acted. The choice of the cause implies the choice 
of its effect, especially when that effect is known 
in the making of the choice. 



The Positive Argument for Miracles 107 

God owed no man the debt of restoration. 
That fact is what invests with heavenly signifi- 
cance the divine revelation which, without sin, 
could never have been apprehended. If both 
sons had stayed at home, the world would have 
missed the true appreciation of the prodigal son^s 
forgiving father. There had to be a poor man by 
the wayside, to reveal the true nature of the 
Samaritan, as well as of the priest and the Levite. 
If man had never been lost, God could never 
have been known, as we know him now, in seek- 
ing and in saving. 

Still, God being a God of love, in a certain rever- 
ent sense we may say he owed it to himself to pro- 
vide salvation for lost men. His nature assured, 
prompted, provided, offered, applied, redemption. 
The law of a rational being, guiding and choosing 
his rational actions, is not automatic. There is a 
law of freedom, of choice itself, of the disposition 
that determines the choice. In this high sense is 
it true that there is a law in the free, sovereign, 
holy nature of God himself, which law is pro- 
foundly and preeminently supernatural. In the 
exercise of his mercy and love, we w^ere almost 
saying, he could scarcely do less than he did to 
restore a sin-blasted, sin-blurred, sin-blighted race. 

This is the positive argument for supernatural 
Christianity. By as much as man was made for 
a better state and a higher life than now are his, 



108 Christianity Supernat^iral 

by as much as a God of infinite love would be 
moved to provide succor for his ruined and sink- 
ing but immortal and redeemable creatures, by as 
much as a heavenly Father exceeds an earthly 
parent in love to his folly-cursed children and in 
resources to provide a way of return, by so much 
is the presumption of the empirical observer of 
events overbalanced and overcome by the higher 
presumption that, if there is a living God, he 
will invade the dead circles of the uniform and 
bring relief and life to fallen men. 

Man broke the pristine charm of his innocence ; 
but, like the chemist with the broken egg, he could 
not restore even the fracture of the shell. Nature 
is perverted, distorted, tortured, by sin. ^^The 
scheme of nature is a scheme unstrung and mis- 
tuned, to a very great degree, by man^s agency in 
it, so as to be rather t^nnature, after all, than 
nature/^ ^ This earth is for something better than 
thorns and thistles ; this body is for something 
higher than groans and pains; this soul is for 
something holier than jealousies and hates. What 
we call nature, what science calls nature, has not 
that in itself which will right itself. We shall 
never see written across the heavens, into which 
Napoleon said no man could look and doubt that 
there is a God, ^^ For God so loved the world, that 
he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever 

^ Bushnell's Nature and the Supernatural^ p. 46. 



The Positive Argument for Miracles 109 

believeth in him should not perish^ but have ever- 
lasting life. In the green fields, we shall never 
hear the voices of nature calling out, " Come unto 
me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I 
will give you rest/^ Nor in the silence and soli- 
tude of the wilderness shall we hear the gentle 
breezes whisper, "The Son of man is come to 
seek and to save that which was lost/^ 

Dr. Christlieb has said, using his words in a 
sense his own, but easily understood, in speaking 
of Christianity : " Its beginning is a miracle ; its 
Author is a miracle; its progress depends upon 
miracles, and they will hereafter be its consumma- 
tion/^^ Christianity de-supernaturalized is Chris- 
tianity extinct. Every argument for Christianity, 
with its Christ, with its cross, and with its crown, 
is an argument for the supernatural. Granted 
one miracle, all philosophical difficulties disappear. 
As Dean Mansel truly wrote : ^* If any one mira- 
cle recorded in the gospels be once admitted as 
true, the remainder cease to have any antecedent 
improbability at all.^^^ The chain is not as weak 
as its weakest link ; it is as strong as its strongest 
link. Principal Dawson, in an address before the 
Evangelical Alliance recently,^ strongly objected 

^ Modern Doubt and Christian Faith, p. 286. 

2 Limits of Religious Thought^ p. 217. 

3 London, June, 1896. 



110 Christianity Supernatural 

to the words " natural ^^ and "supernatural/' pre- 
ferring the Bible words, "naturaF^ and "spirit- 
ual/^ It is a question whether the terms connote 
correlative ideas, but it is the thought we insist 
upon. If a scientist imagines that he can map 
out the thought and mind and love and grace of 
God so as to predicate such laws as he finds in 
nature, and predict such future events as can be 
based upon past experiences, then he is aspiring to 
infinities and aiming at impossibilities. The cross 
of Calvary is not simply nature's coat of arms. 
The love of God in Jesus Christ is something 
more than the law of gravitation or cohesion or 
affinity. A supernatural revelation is something 
other and more than "simply the imperative 
mood of nature.^' Dignus vindice nodus. The 
great interloper is to be overcome. The pathology 
of a morbid, sickly, sinful world calls out for 
help; and since God is neither tied nor bound by 
the network of laws in the world that is about us, 
the divine therapeutics of redemption is applied. 
Without the Great Physician, the sick world is 
doomed to death. Without Jesus Christ, man is 
without God and without hope in the world. 
With Jesus Christ, objections to minor miracles 
subside and disappear, and the birth and life and 
resurrection and redeeming work of Jesus Christ 
are precisely what we expect, and that is Chris- 
tianity. 



Statistics is history at a standstill. — Schlozer. 

The historian is the prophet looking backward. — Schle- 

GEL. 

Prophecy is the expression of an ideal truth which, just 
because it contains an eternal law of the order of the world, 
also finds ever new fulfillment in all times. — Pfleiderer. 

Every step by which the consciousness of mankind has 
emerged from the life of nature and from the rudest primitive 
notions of itself and the world, up to its present point of 
advancement, lives in the present consciousness of the race, 
transmuted but not annihilated. — John Cairb. 

Ill 



CHAPTER VIII 

PROPHECY 

Early apologetics made very much of the ful- 
fillment of predictive prophecy as an evidence of 
the truth of Christianity. The same tendency that 
has disparaged miracles has disparaged this kind 
of proof. And no wonder, for they are closely 
akin. They both appeal, we are told, to our lower 
faculties, and so are unworthy. This bell also, 
which in primitive times called men to believe, is 
now cracked and '^ jangling.'^ 

It is certainly true that prophecy is more than 
prediction. The historian was sometimes a prophet ; 
the agitator, the reformer, the preacher, in ancient 
times, sometimes was only another role for the 
prophet of God. 

It is possible that undue emphasis has been put 
upon the work of tallying the facts of history with 
earlier vaticinations, and that the disposition to 
produce tally sheets surprisingly and suspiciously 
exact has played fantastic and foolish tricks in the 
past. It is also possible that predispositions have 
approached the question from the other side as well. 

8 113 



114 Christianity Supernatural 

The enthusiasm with which it has been announced 
that the early dates of the fulfilled predictions 
must^ after critical study^ be brought down to a 
time so near the tallying fact as to rob the whole 
matter of the extraordinary^ and the partisan 
spirit with wdiich men have argued that the pre- 
dictions themselves are so worded as to make im- 
possible their specific reference to any particular 
event, justify the suspicion that possibly the reac- 
tion from this old-time proof has gone very de- 
cidedly to the other extreme. 

There should be no desire to challenge the 
assured results of critical study. Christianity has 
least need of all of that champion who would 
make its truth to appear by any evidence that is 
not itself absolutely true. Apologetics regard 
with solicitude the final verdicts pronounced in 
every court of biblical criticism. The apologist 
accepts those verdicts and shapes his defense ac- 
cordingly. Critic meets critic, and, after their 
battle, the field of evidences must adjust itself to 
the result. 

It is impossible to believe that this proof from 
fulfilled predictions has been nullified by the dis- 
integrations of a negative criticism. We all know 
human nature well enough to know that no man can 
foretell what will come to pass in the distant future. 
No man knows what a single day will bring forth. 



Prophecy 115 

An impenetrable veil hides the next moment from 
our eyes. It is true^ general predictions can be 
based upon generalized statements of past events. 
Mr. Buckle constructs an argument that does scant 
honor to the freedom of man, upon our ability to 
base, upon the statistics of the last year or the last 
decade, a foretelling of facts for the next year or 
the next decade. This is a very interesting ques- 
tion, upon which men of different views pronounce 
very different answers. But statistics are general 
and are based not so much upon the direct choice 
of the individual will as upon certain general con- 
ditions and circumstances without, in view of 
which men will probably choose to do as they 
chose to do in those same general conditions before. 
And this mechanical, statistical view of history has 
its narrow limits at best. A student of the sub- 
ject may be able to say, within limits, how many 
murders will be committed in London during the 
year 1900, from a careful comparison of the num- 
ber of murders in London for many years in the 
recent past. Experience proves that this statistical 
prediction often fails, and there are often seasons 
of epidemics in crime and spasms of virtue unfore- 
tellable, and unaccountable when past. But, grant- 
ing all that is true in this, it can in no way explain 
the predictions of the Old Testament. The science 
of comparative statistics was then largely unknown. 
The periods stretching between the prediction and 



116 Chy^istianity Supernatural 

its event were far beyond that of any one man's 
life. They reached into other centuries, other na- 
tions, other dynasties, other civil and social and 
political conditions. Much less, for the same rea- 
son, can these be accounted for by the sagacious 
guessings or shrewd forecastings of farsighted 
genius. 

There is a vast deal to be done in removing 
what Christianity regards as unmovable before 
the predictive prophecies of former ages can be 
reduced simply to ^^a foresight based upon in- 
sight.'' 

It belongs to the exegetical critic to show that 
the predictions themselves evidently refer to some 
specific event. He must inform us whether it is 
merely pious guessing at random, whether it refers 
to some fact within the eye-range of contempora- 
neous genius, or whether it contemplates conditions 
then far in the distance. Having these furnished 
us, it is within the power of any plain, honest 
student of the English Bible to note for himself 
whether the correspondence is real and complete 
and convincing; for Dean Mozley has truly said 
of predictive prophecy : ^^The essence of prophecy 
is the correspondence, not the futurity, of the 
event predicted."^ 

It is impossible, within prescribed limits, to do 

^ Eight Lectures on Miracles^ p. 119. 



Prophecy 117 

more than has been done, in intimating the force 
and vahie of this evidence. If Christianity is of 
God, the whole revelation of God in Christ is 
divine. The plan unfolds, develops, expands, 
from the first word, '' The seed of the woman shall 
bruise the serpent^s head.'^ There is the promise 
of a Saviour to come. Age by age, the plan un- 
folds, the promise is specialized. Of the seed of 
Abraham, of the tribe of Judah, of the house of 
David, he is to be. The Messianic psalms have 
an unmistakable reference to him who came. 
The fifty -third chapter of Isaiah reads like preterit 
history. The mind, untrained to doubt, under- 
stands it to mean Jesus as quickly as the words 
of Matthew or of Mark. Compare the vivid 
predictions of Nineveh and Babylon with their 
history. Read how Jerusalem is to be plowed 
over as a field. Go, as the writer of these words 
has gone, and walk over the literally plowed 
furrows, scarcely a stone's throw from the minaret 
of the mosque of Omar, where the temple once 
stood, and under the shadow of the present walls 
of the sacred city, and you will not wait to read 
that Terentius Rufus once plowed over the site 
of the city. Study the marvelous predictions con- 
cerning the Jewish people, and then study the 
marvelous career they have had. Compare the 
predictive utterances of our Lord with the de- 
tails of the facts as they are. Go to Bethsaida 



118 Christianity Supernatural 

and Capernaum^ and behold for yourself, in un- 
frequented marshes and tumbledown ruins, the 
awe-inspiring literalness of the fulfillment. Take 
your Bible for your guidebook, and travel from 
Jaffa to the Dead Sea, and from Hebron, with its 
Cave of Machpelah, to Damascus in the ancient 
vale of the north, and see for yourself how well 
your guidebook serves you in detailing before the 
time the conditions you discover and the scenes 
you see. Or, if you are too busy to visit Pales- 
tine, you may this very day see in your morning 
paper how the most recent investigations of the 
archaeologist in the valleys of the Tigris and the 
Euphrates are not only confirming the historical 
description of the Old Testament Scriptures, but 
are also proving anew the literal truth of their 
recorded predictions. 

It is not now said that this is the only or the 
strongest proof of prophecy. It is said that it is 
a valuable, an unanswerable evidence that, in that 
great revelation of God which is Christianity, there 
is an element surpassing human wisdom, tran- 
scending human foresight, and attesting the guid- 
ance and the presence in it all of the supernatural 
and the divine. 

It would, however, be a mistake amounting to 
injustice to suppose that all those who question 
the evidential value of predicted events go so far 



Prophecy 119 

as to deny that prophecy is any evidence of Chris- 
tianity. They pkice great emphasis upon the 
proof wliich it is said to present. This aspect of 
prophecy has not always been freely recognized, 
but it is hardly necessary to make nothing of pre- 
diction in order to make out the moral proofs 
from prophecy. This we ought to have done, 
and not leave the other undone. 

The idea now is that the prophets of God, in 
their " passion for righteousness/' in their loyalty 
to sublime ideals, and in their unfaltering faith in 
a just and holy Governor of the world, were so 
conspicuously above and beyond the prevailing 
levels of their age as to be, in themselves, for all 
time, the noblest and strongest evidences of the 
truth of the system with which they were identi- 
fied. They were inspired witness bearers of eter- 
nal realities. Their testimony was especially 
suited to their own surroundings, but they spoke 
a language that is understood always and every- 
where. '' We lose, doubtless, a miracle of fore- 
sight in the form of a prediction of deliverance 
through Cyrus, but w^e gain a moral miracle of 
faith and hope amid circumstances tempting to 
despair.''^ One may be pardoned for failing to 
perceive how the " moral miracle'' gains force by 
the loss of the '' miracle of foresight." It is not 
the question whether it is too crude or too easy or 

^ Bruce 's Apologetics^ p. 243. 



120 Christianity Supernatural 

too childish, but is it true? Criticism has not 
shown that it is not true, and so we need not lose 
the first in order to gain the second. 

Still, this ethical aspect of prophecy is indeed a 
strong testimony to the truth of Christianity. The 
faith of an Abraham, the humility of a Moses, 
the denunciations of an Elijah, the spirit of an 
Isaiah, though not without their faults, stand as 
mighty moral teachings, in concrete form, of time- 
less truth and dateless righteousness. Amid sins, 
deep and dark, they cried out for holiness. In 
ages of hopeless degradation, they sounded the call 
of moral and spiritual purity. In idolatrous gen- 
erations, they were witnesses to the forgotten true 
and living God. When doubt and indifference and 
despair and moral death sank down like an awful 
pall upon the nations, these martyrs for truth, 
these heroes of righteousness, these prophets of 
God, coming age after age as those sent of Heaven 
on Heaven's errand, stood stalwart and unmoved, 
like a rock in an angry sea, like an Alpine peak 
against the fury of the storm— preaching, remon- 
strating, denouncing, calling, pleading, command- 
ing, in the name of the God who had shaken 
Sinai's summit while trembling Israel waited 
at the mountain's base. They were exotics of 
truth in a world of ignorance and error; they 
were shining lights in a world of moral night ; 



Prophecy 121 

they were voices of God in the wildernesses of 
sin. 

The force of all this is not diminished because by 
many it is viewed only as we view the convincing 
force of a godly life in later Christian ages. A 
star that is brilliant at midnight has long since 
faded from sight at noon. An Abraham and a 
David may have been less perfect saints than a 
Paul or a John^ but the fact that they stood out as 
they did, from the masses of their time, with the 
ideals they cherished, with the truths they taught, 
with the failures they scored — for a failure is a 
witness to a height not unseen, but yet unreached- — 
all this does constitute one of the grandest evi- 
dences of the truth of God. Nor is it lost by 
comparison with the saints of pagan calendars. 
There are spiritual diameters between a primitive 
Abraham, with his simple faith in God, and a 
Confucius who sees nothing invisible ; between a 
Moses communing with the self-existent Jehovah 
of the covenant, and Zoroaster with his two con- 
tending gods; between an Isaiah grasping the 
thought of sin forgiven, and a Buddha seeking 
happiness in the very obliteration of the disposition 
to seek. We would not undervalue the ethical 
virtues or the rational utterances of alien systems ; 
these have been vastly overstated, and men have 
often placed a few select and exceptional gleanings 
from oriental systems against the whole body of 



122 Christianity Supernatural 

Scripture truth ; even so, the proof of '' prophet- 
ism'^ stands unchanged and unchallenged. The 
prophets themselves, and their prophecies which 
they spoke, suited to the needs of their own age, 
suited to the needs of every age, sublimely uplift- 
ing, ethically pure, intrinsically true, freighted with 
the perfumes of heaven amid the moral miasmata 
of sin and vice and unbelief — these are proofs that 
grow in power and shine in brighter splendor as 
mankind are learning more and more to perceive 
the beautiful, to love the good, and to believe the 
true. 



The word of God is an anvil that has worn out many a 
hammer. — Venerable Bede. 

All our ideas of progress, with all the forward-looking 
spirit of modern Christendom, are due to Scripture. — 
Strong. 

In the Bible there is more that finds me than I have ex- 
perienced in all other books put together. — Coleridge. 

The English Bible — a book which, if everything else in 
our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the 
whole extent of its beauty and power.— Macaulay. 

It would take a Jesus to forge a Jesus. — Theo. Parker. 

123 



CHAPTER IX 

SCRIPTURE 

It is entirely conceivable that the substance of 
Christianity is true, even though there were no 
such book as the Bible in existence. The great 
doctrines of God and holiness and right and char- 
acter and destiny are not intrinsically contingent 
upon a little volume which a playful child may 
fling into the flames. 

However, Christianity, as it is, is something 
more than an abstract of transcendental truth. It 
is truth made concrete. It comes down to the 
levels of history. Its high abstractions become 
living forces, its eternal principles blossom into 
fadeless facts. Christianity, not as it might be 
but as it is, stakes its claims to truth upon Sinai 
and Calvary, upon Egyptian oppressions and Baby- 
lonian captivities, upon Judsean scenes and apostolic 
missions. It is history as well as doctrine, it is fact 
as well as theory, it is the real as well as the ideal. 
The truths of Christianity have so transformed 
themselves into the living forces of the past, they 
have so inwrought themselves into the very warp 

126 



126 Christianity Supernatural 

and woof of humanity, that we cease to regard 
them simply as a cold volume of abstractions ap- 
pealing to the philosophic instinct or the rational 
powers only ; they have become incarnate, historic, 
concrete, real, and we justly judge their merits by 
those signs and symbols with which their fate is so 
inseparably linked. 

If God is to reveal himself to man at all, it 
must needs be that he do it under the conditions 
of space and time. That means history. Unless, 
as Dr. Martineau teaches, a revelation '' at second 
hand^^ is impossible, it is necessary that a witness- 
ing record of former revelations, now ceased, must 
be placed in the hands of men to-day. That means 
Scripture. If at sundry times and in divers man- 
ners in time past God by the prophets spake unto 
the fathers, and if in later days he spoke unto 
his apostles by his Son, who is the express image 
of his Person, then in these last days of ours, 
when prophets are asleep and apostles are treasured 
memories of history, if we are to hear his voice 
and catch his message, it is because the written 
word preserves, embalms, perpetuates, his revela- 
tions to the farthest ends of time and the remotest 
regions of the earth. 

Thus it is that Christianity is embodied in a 
book. 

This book is, to him who sees it for the first 



Scripture 127 

time, precisely like every other book. If after- 
wards it seems to him unique and alone in all 
literature, it is because he first regarded it as he 
would regard any other book. He finds, to his 
amazement, in testing it as a book, that there is 
no other book like it. If the Bible cannot stand 
the sharpest scrutinies of the critic, so much the 
worse for the Bible. Let the critic only be fair, 
and the Christian has no cause to complain. 

It is not in mind now to discuss the critical 
questions that are raised nowadays by the study 
of the Christian Scriptures. We are to take a 
hasty glance at Scripture and consider whether it 
furnishes any evidence that Christianity is super- 
natural. We shall not now argue that the Bible 
is inspired. We shall hardly take time to insist 
that its contents are historically true. The limits 
set upon our task admonish us that volumes must 
be pages, and that vast ranges of tempting evi- 
dence must not be even so much as mentioned. 

The Bible is the battlefield of modern faith and 
unbelief. There is scant ground for despair when 
the word of God is more and more commanding 
and compelling the ripest intellectual energies of 
men. The men who call it false cannot bring 
themselves to dismiss it as unworthy of their further 
study. Strauss said that the Copernican astronomy 
struck the death knell of Bible Christianity; but 
somehow the Bible did not lose its place at the 



128 Christianity Swpernatural 

center of civilization when the race got it fairly 
fixed in their minds that the earth revolves around 
the sun. and not the sun around the earth. 

Some of the Philistines are going so far just 
now as to lead us to suspect that if they are right 
Scripture is wrong, and that if Scripture is 
wrong Christianity is a dream. Mr. Gladstone 
has hopefulness enough to say that " if the most 
greedily destructive among all the theories of the 
modern critics (rather seriously at variance with 
one another) were established as true, it would not 
avail to impair the great facts of the history of 
man . . . nor to disguise the light which those 
facts throw upon the pages of the sacred volume, 
nor to abate the commanding force with which — 
bathed, so to speak, in the flood of that light — 
the Bible invites, attracts, and commands tlie ad- 
hesion of mankind.'^ ^ 

Precisely this is the standpoint of our study 
now. Let the critics have their way ; let unbelief 
cut and cleave to its full content ; let men prove, 
if they can, that the dear old Bible is a tissue of 
falsehoods or of follies : when they have done, we 
shall claim the humble right to call attention to 
the strangest of all strange facts, that this " scroll 
of fancies '^ is the subject of more study, more in- 
vestigation, more serious thought, than any other 
hundred books in any library of the world ; that 
^ The hnpregnahle Rock of Holy Scripture^ p. 25. 



Scrqdure 1 2D 

this ^^ bundle of superstitions'' lies imbedded like 
a corner stone of granite beneath the grandest ■ 
achievements of human civilization^ and that this 
little manual of ^^ exploded nonsense'' somehow 
continues to hold its own, and^ in Mr. Gladstone's 
words, '' invites, attracts, and commands the adhe- 
sion of mankind." 

The starting point of our thought is the Bible 
itself. Whatever else it is or is not, the Bible is 
itself a fact. It is about the most pervasive, the 
most ubiquitous fact, in book form, with which 
we are acquainted. In civilized lands, at least, it 
is hard to get very far away from a Bible. You 
find it in railway cars and in steamboat drawing- 
rooms. It greets you in hotel chambers in almost 
every city of Europe or America. If a man give 
his testimony in a law controversy between his 
neighbors, he places his hand upon the Bible and 
solemnly promises to speak the truth. The presi- 
dent of the greatest republic of history, in the 
presence of his admiring fellow-citizens, reverently 
places his lips to that little book before those lips 
presume to speak the solemn words with which 
he enters upon his vast responsibilities. You visit 
your friend in his home, and Bibles great and 
small you see scattered about the apartments of 
his house. You will not be surprised if, morning 
and evening, he hand you one of these and ask 

9 



130 Christianity Supernatural 

you to join his family as they sit^ each with a 
Bible in hand^ and read in turn a passage from its 
pages — all reverently concluded with a prayer in 
worship of Almighty God. Visit many of our 
colleges^ and you will find the Bible studied as no 
other book is studied. Go into the public schools 
of civilized countries^ and, for the most part, you 
will find it reverently read as the sacred book 
among all the books that are the object of their 
study. Betake yourself to the sanctum of the 
editor ; you will find his Bible and his dictionary 
at his elbow. Come into the office of an attorney, 
and you will justly conclude that he is unworthy 
of a single client if you do not find the code of 
Moses on his shelves along with the Commentaries 
of Blackstone. Visit the literary man, the poet, 
the orator, the statesman, the scientist, the philoso- 
pher, and you will find among their books of 
reference somewhere near at hand this same little 
Bible. 

Besides all this, remember the millions of chil- 
dren, old and young, that assemble one day in the 
week, especially for the systematic study of this 
book. Think of the thousands and thousands of 
great buildings, and not so great, in the city and 
in the country everywhere, in which from time to 
time, very frequently, millions of enlightened, cul- 
tivated, refined people, many of them, assemble to 
hear this book explained and preached from. Think 



Scripture 131 

of the vast Bible societies printing this book in 
three hundred and fifty different languages, and 
sending it far and wide, for pay — or, if need be, 
for nothing — into every land on earth. Think of 
the tremendous volume of literature, from the 
stately scholastic tome to the merest penny lesson 
leaf, that is being constantly thrown off the 
printer's desk, to defend, to explain, and to en- 
force, this same little Bible. 

Certainly, not mucli is risked in starting with 
the Bible as a /ad to-day. 

But this fact is not of yesterday's sudden ap- 
pearing. We know that our Bible was also the 
Bible of our fathers. The career of this little 
book in the past is one of the marvels of history. 
Too many hostile eyes have been upon it in every 
age, to allow of its putting forth claims it could 
not make good in fact. It has had to carve its 
course down the lines of history. No sensible 
man questions its antiquity. Exactly how or 
when it originated is a subject upon which com- 
petent minds, though having sharp disagreements 
in detail, are in many ways agreed. There is no 
doubt that the Old Testament which we have to- 
day is identical with the sacred Scriptures which 
the Jews held in reverence at the beginning of our 
era. Damaging assaults upon the authenticity and 
the authority of the several books of our New Tes- 



132 Christianity Sv^jernatural 

tament have again and again been made, but the 
results only stand more fully assured. The three 
Synoptic Gospels have stood the tests and are ac- 
cepted to-day. The Fourth Gospel, confessedly of 
later date, is certainly traced back to conditions 
that would have effectively contradicted its claims 
if they had been false. No reasonable school of 
skeptical criticism denies that Paul is the author 
of some of the books in our New Testament that 
bear his name. Men have proved that George 
Washington never lived and that the battle of 
Waterloo is a myth, and so we are not surprised 
that there are those who deny that Paul wrote the 
first four Pauline Epistles; but we are to remember 
that their very '^ hardihood ^^ is sufficient to bar 
them out from the lists of reasonable skeptics.^ Let 
the doubtful portions go, our enemies being judges; 
but what shall we say of what is left ? Here it 
is — how did it become what it is ? How did it 
acquire such a dominating influence? What is 
the secret of its power? Is it a kind of magic 
which, without this book, the world had never seen 
or known? Is this magnificent fact which our 
eyes behold to-day, shaping civilizations, molding 
nationalities, transforming empires, turning the 
tides of history, gradually ingratiating itself into 
the innermost life of mankind, and slowly impart- 
ing a new spirit into the heart of humanity — is this 
^ Bruce 's St. PauVs Conception of Christianity^ p. 2. 



Scripture 1 33 

wholly to be accounted for on the basis of the 
natural ? Is the Bible but a product of genius, 
only a grand hit in literature, a riper fruit of the 
human mind ? 

If the Bible be true, Christianity is true; and 
if Christianity is true, Christianity is supernatural. 
If the Bible be false, Christianity is false also ; but 
we have the mightiest miracle of history, a '' book 
of lies,'^ rising by its own inherent springing force 
to the topmost place in the world's highest thought 
and life and character and hope, commending itself 
as true to the keenest intellects, as good to the 
purest souls, as divine to the saintliest among the 
human. It is easier to believe the Bible true, 
judging only from its career, than to believe it 
false. If it is true, its power is the supernatural 
power of Almighty God ; if it is false, its undis- 
puted supremacy in the world to-day can be scarcely 
less than a miracle of the father of lies. 

But the wonderful influence of this book is not 
without an explanation. It is a wonder in itself. 
It was not written by one man. It is rather a 
library than a single volume. It is sixty-six dif- 
ferent books, bound as one. Instead of a single 
author, it is the work of nearly fifty. Instead of 
being the output of a single lifetime, it was fifteen 
hundred years in the making. There was the 
greatest variety imaginable among the authors of 



134 Christianity Supernatural 

these books : wise men^ kings, priests, reformers, 
fishermen, physicians, tax collectors ; men of high 
intellectual refinement, and men who never saw a 
college ; men of most aristocratic social antecedents 
and surroundings, and men whose instincts and 
ideas were in keeping with the lowly social station 
which they occupied ; men who lived amid the re- 
gal splendors of a theocratic monarchy, and men 
who were citizens of an humble province lorded 
over by a haughty Csesar at Rome. And yet, with 
all this wide range of mental caliber and moral 
fiber, there is a harmony, a unity, running through- 
out the whole, that is obvious to every student of 
the Word. As Augustine said : '' The New Tes- 
tament lies latent in the Old, and the Old Testa- 
ment lies patent in the New.'^ The Bible, as a 
book, is an organism. There is a growth in its 
thought. There is a development in its revela- 
tion ; but it is one throughout, as the acorn and 
the tree are one, as the blade and the ear and the 
full corn in the ear are one. 

This is a striking fact in connection with the 
Scriptures. If we try to duplicate it elsewhere, we 
may see its significance. Try to find fifty philoso- 
phers or five philosophers covering fifteen hundred 
years or fifteen years, who will discuss the themes 
of their philosophy without contradictions and 
disagreements that would destroy the unity of the 
whole. Let a dozen statesmen discourse upon the 



Scripture 135 

thiugs of statesmanship^ and you will soon find 
that tliere will be as many differing policies. 
Visit any symposium of science; summon the 
scientific leaders of our own time; listen to the 
words of those who believe alike^ in evolution, 
for example, and you will find that a Darwin and 
Wallace and Huxley and Spencer each has his 
own peculiar view, that is not only different from, 
but inconsistent with, those of the others. 

But is it objected that these are the subjects upon 
which men may be expected to disagree? And 
yet we are told that science has to do with un- 
changing facts, uniform laws, and mathematical 
demonstrations. Is there any realm of thought in 
which men are more apt to disagree than in that 
of religious truth ? With the varying contents 
of mental, material, ethical principle, moral force, 
and transcendental religious speculation incident to 
human nature, it may well be that, with all their 
underlying principles in common, men who are 
religious teachers, and w^ho draw only upon their 
own resources for what they teach, differ more 
sharply and disagree more incompatibly than those 
who deal with any other kind of practical or 
speculative truth. 

But this fact only serves as the better foil for 
the marvelous unity of the Christian Scriptures. 
Moses testifies of Christ, and Christ came to fulfill 
the law of Moses. The fall by sin, as told in 



136 Christianity Supernatural 

Genesis, has its place in redemption as unfolded to 
the Romans. '^ The testimony of Christ is the 
spirit of prophecy/^ 

While the individualities of the fifty writers 
are by no means suppressed, it so falls out that 
their ignorance and prejudice do not come in to 
mar the essential harmony of the whole. This 
unparalleled feature of Scripture is an unsolved 
enigma, if Christianity be natural and only natu- 
ral ; it falls as a corollary from the truth, if it be 
supernatural. 

The naturalist is hardly done with miracles 
when he dismisses Christianity as natural. We 
would not be guilty of arguing success as an evi- 
dence of the divine, but we may argue that human 
knowledge is a chimera, and the desire to know is 
a constitutional deception, if it can be that the 
sanest and soberest and most aspiring portion of 
mankind, applying lionest tests and seeking simple 
truth, have been hoodwinked into believing a 
budget of falsehoods to be a revelation from God. 
Is it too much to say that the portion of our race 
which has been identified with what the historian 
calls the Christian civilization has, in part at least, 
contained sanest, soberest, and saintliest spirits, 
and is it too much to say that such have pro- 
foundly believed that Christianity is of God ? 

Here is a miracle of psychology. Here is the 



Sc7npture 137 

most puzzling fact of history. No wonder, we 
sometimes think^ that a man who does not believe 
Christianity true^ and who looks about him and 
sees that so many apparently sound-minded, true- 
hearted men and women do believe it to be true — 
no wonder that such a man throws up his hands 
in dismay and cries out with Pilate, " What is 
truth T^ or, with David Hume and Herbert Spen- 
cer, ^' How can truth be known f^ 

That Bible is weapon enough against the assaults 
of boldest unbelief. If its lids were never opened, 
skepticism cannot account for the career that book 
has had. The single portraiture of Jesus^ as we 
see him in the gospels, is little less than a miracle, 
on the theory that the Bible is a product of nature. 
There are four writers, and yet there is entire con- 
sistency. It takes genius to conceive and carry 
out a character which is the creature of our own 
imagination. The best fiction writers say that 
they make their characters to live before them, 
and then they note the deeds that they would do. 
But such a character is a child of its creator's 
brain ; the creator must be greater than its creature. 

Who is then to conceive and paint the character 
of Jesus, to speak his words, to preach his 
sermon on the mount, to coin his parables, to 
manufacture the stories of his miracles, to por- 
tray his lifelike spirit of tenderness, wisdom, 
love? Well may Dr. Bushnell say: ^^ Nothing is 



138 Christianity Supernatural 

so difficult, all literature testifies, as to draw a 
character and keep it in its living proportions. 
How much more to draw a perfect character and 
not discolor it fatally by marks from the imper- 
fection of the biographer/^ ^ 

The man who had the literary genius to make 
a Bible out of nothing confounds the conclusions 
of the world's wisdom and is himself the substi- 
tute for that in which the faith of men is confident. 
Rousseau's remark is fully justified, that " the in- 
ventor of such a being as Jesus w^ould be a more 
astonishing character than the hero/' 

If Hamlet is great, the brain of a Shakespeare 
is greater. If Jesus is good, the thought of the 
man who could conjure a Jesus from the shades 
of his own fancy is better. If the Bible, with its 
great truths, its accredited facts, and its inspiring 
promises, is wonderful, the inventor of such a 
book is more wonderful. If Christianity, with 
its Eternal God, its Incarnate Christ, and its re- 
deemed humanity, is a fiction, then the fabricator 
of that fiction is as supernatural as the Christianity 
in which the Christian believes. 

^ Nature and the Supernatural^ p. 357. 



The evolution which is slowly proceeding in human soci- 
ety is not primarily intellectual, but religious, in character. 

— KiDD. 

We are but of yesterday, and yet we have filled all your 
places, your cities, your islands, your castles, your towns, 
your council houses, even your camps, your tribes, your 
senate, your forum. We have left you nothing but your 
temples. — Tertullia^\ 

For I say, this is death and the sole death. 
When a man's loss comes to him from his gain, 
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance. 
And lack of love from love made manifest. 

— Browning. 

Henceforth my heart shall sigh no more 
For olden time and holier shore ; 
God's love and blessing, then and there, 
Are now and here and everywhere. 

— Whittier. 
139 



CHAPTER X 



HISTORY 



Christianity is now old enough to have shown 
what it is. If eighteen centuries are too short a 
time for a fair experiment^ then it must be admitted 
that its skiggishness is virtually equal to failure. 
Neither can it claim that the conditions have been 
such as to make a fair test impossible ; it is part 
of its work to prepare the conditions. It is because 
the world was all wrong, that Christianity under- 
took to make it right. That would be a strange 
kind of physician, who would excuse himself from 
failure on the ground that his patient was sick when 
he was called. It is because men get sick that 
physicians are needed at all. It is because man- 
kind are helpless and hopeless that redemption 
had any occasion whatever to be. And unless it 
has in itself a power to quicken and renovate and 
restore these dead relics of the race, then failure is 
the verdict. 

By its fruits let it be judged. Dropping dialec- 
tical tactics, let history pass its plain judgment 
upon the merits of Christianity. Steering clear 

141 



142 Christianity Supernatural 

of the two-edged argument that because it began 
so small, and from its small beginnings has grown 
so great, therefore Christianity is divine, let us con- 
sider for a little the nature and drift of the moral 
influence which this growing religion has exerted 
upon the world. It is not possible to itemize the 
evidence which history affords.^ We can only 
glance at the trend of that evidence. 

It is perfectly plain that the principles of Chris- 
tianity tend to broaden the sympathies of those 
who accept them. It is a persistent arraignment 
of the crime of selfishness. Men who decline to 
grant the claims of the Preacher on the mount go 
into ecstasies of admiration over the sermon on the 
mount. Jesus Christ was the first teacher of uni- 
versal ethnography. " The field is the world,'^ he 
said. The Samaritan brought relief to the suffer- 
ing Jew by the wayside, and, though he belonged 
to a race that for ages had been at the outs with 
the Jews, yet he, and not the fellow-Hebrew, 
either priest or Levite, who passed by on the other 
side, was indeed neighbor to the wounded man. 
Neighborship, then, is a thing of spirit and not of 
geography or of kin. " Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, 

' The reader can consult such books as Dr. Dorchester's 
Problem of Religious Progress^ Brace's Gesta Chrisii^ and 
Dr. R. S. Storrs' The Divine Origin of Christianity indicated 
by its Historical Effects. 



History 143 

and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind ; 
and thy neighbor as thyself J^ " Therefore all things 
whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do 
ye even so to them/' 

Do men talk learnedly of altruism nowadays? 
What is all this but altruism? Prof. Huxley 
found no signs of it in the "cosmic process/^ 
Prof. Drummond thinks he does find them there, 
and even enthusiastically says : " The vicarious 
principle is shot through and through the whole 
vast web of nature.^^ ^ If we sometimes must con- 
fess that in this we have no better eyes than 
Prof. Huxley had, still we can agree with Prof. 
Drummond when he says : " From selfism to 
otherism is the supreme transition of history.^^^ 
Only, we locate that supreme transition definitely 
in the teachings, the life, the character — and, most 
of all, in the death — of Him who gave not only 
his name, but also his Spirit, to Christianity. 

It is easy to make the mistake of identifying too 
closely civilization and Christianity. As Guizot 
has pointed out, the former is a term of very elastic 
meaning. There was a Grecian civilization, and a 
Roman civilization; there is a Chinese civilization 
and a European civilization. But in the lexicons 
of common speech it must be said tliat, in modern 

1 The Ascent of Man, p. 18. 

2 Ibid., p. 220. 



144 Christianity Supernatural 

history, civilization par excellence is the Christian 
civilization. It is the whole complex life of an 
age whose ideas and motives and laws and customs 
and institutions are '' shot through and through ^^ 
with the indirect influences of Christianity. The 
ethics of Christian civilization are founded upon 
Christianity. The ideas of civil government con- 
template it. The relations between ruler and 
ruled, between employer and employed, between 
buyer and seller, between teacher and learner, are 
tempered by the softened atmosphere of Christian- 
ity. The home at its best is the gift of Christian- 
ity. The marriage relation is sealed and sanctified 
by its benedictions. Society is transformed from 
Huxley's '' wilderness of apes '^ into a sweet and 
cheerful altruistic colony of men and women. Is 
it said that this is ideal ? Let it be so. To the 
honor of Christianity be it remembered that its 
aims are never realized this side of absolute per- 
fection. If the ideal is not realized, the fault is 
not with the ideal. Rousseau actually says : '^ The 
shortcomings of Christians do not prove that re- 
ligion is superfluous, but that few persons are re- 
ligious.^' If hypocrites are many, it only proves 
that the value of the genuine coin is the more 
highly appreciated. Men do not counterfeit pen- 
nies, but sovereigns ; not dimes, but dollars. 

The salutary influences of Christianity are so 
pervasive that no member of society can escape 



History 145 

them if he would. How hidicrous for the son of 
a Christian home^ the alumnus of a Christian col- 
lege^ to turn his fire upon the very Christianity 
that gave him both his guns and his ammunition ! 
Men would fain divorce morality from religion ; 
but, if that divorce had been proclaimed before 
they themselves had inherited the blessings of the 
union, their own poor, miserable, mean selves 
would then have been the most eloquent argument 
for the other side of the question. " The radical 
implication of morality in the religious view of 
the world and history may indeed pass from the 
consciousness of particular individuals who have 
been educated by the Christian community, but it 
continues to exist in the common spirit of the 
whole community, by which the individual moral 
spirit is maintained and reared.^^^ 

Frances Power Cobbe says : " It would take 
several thousand years to make a full-blooded 
atheist out of the scion of forty generations of 
Christianity.^^ A man who learns to speak well 
turns his eloquence into ungrateful denunciations 
of his teacher ; a man who inherits a fortune from 
another uses his wealth to blacken the memory of 
his benefactor; the brilliant son of a Christian 
minister, taught to think and trained in moral 
virtue by his pious father, goes forth from his 

^ Pfleiderer's Philosophy and Development of Religion^ 
\., p. 58. 

10 



146 Christianity Supernatural 

consecrated home to hurl his barbed shafts at 
Christian teaching, and to throw the vitriol of 
his sarcasm into the fair face of godly reverence. 
This is the cut flower of Christian morality; this 
is the soured fruit of Christian civilization. Truly 
the corruption of the best things is the worst. 

Christianity is vividly conscious that its ideals 
are yet far in the distance. If that consciousness 
were dead^ then Christianity were extinct. 

Let it not be forgotten that, with all the short- 
comings of its devotees, the spirit of modern 
Christianity, fully aware of the fields yet to be 
occupied and the foes yet to be overcome, calls out 
with never-ceasing pathos and power, to all who 
love God and fellow-man, to bend every energy to 
the speedy accomplishment of its work and to the 
final redemption of the world. Christianity is not 
known to-day more by what it has done than by 
what, in the name of God, it is aiming to do. It 
beholds with pain and blush the abuses, the op- 
pressions, the cruelties, the hatreds, the sins, that 
curse the habitations of mankind. Every evil it 
sees is a burning call of need. Its voice is raised 
against every form of unrighteousness. Temper- 
ance is its child; fraternity is its spirit; mutual 
burden-bearing is its injunction ; the consolations 
of a deep and tender sympathy are its benison. 
It fans the brow of suffering ; it soothes the nerves 



History 147 

of grief ; it comforts the heart of sorrow ; it echoes, 
in the ears of dying ones, " The Lord is my shep- 
herd/^ '' Let not your heart be troubled/^ " In my 
Father's house are many mansions.'^ After that 
echo dies away, it turns to the bereaved ones and 
cheers their sorrow with a peace which the world 
can neither give nor take away. 

It looks out upon the fields of trade and busi- 
ness and commerce, and bids the busy seekers after 
wealth remember that they are not beasts, but 
men. It offers the only cure for a diseased politi- 
cal economy. In sociology, as it ought to be, 
Christ's law is supreme. In international quar- 
rels, it represses the hand of violence and speaks 
the soft answer that turns away wrath. It is the 
sworn enemy of superstition, and scorns the devo- 
tion which is but the child of ignorance. It sends 
its missionaries into lands that lie in moral dark- 
ness and in spiritual death. The last hundred 
years, with their mighty impulse of Christian for- 
eign missions, are rich in unanswerable evidences 
of the saving power of the gospel of Christ. 
The proof is alike convincing, whether we look at 
those who bore the message or at those who have 
received it. 

David Livingstone, dying on his knees on the 
quiet banks of the inland lake, praying for the 
salvation of Africa, is an argument for Chris- 
tianity matched only by the loving and loyal lives 



148 Christianity Supernatural 

of those who^ by his work, were changed from 
cruel cannibals to consecrated Christians. Read 
the lives of modern missionaries, study the records 
of modern missions, and see what Christianity can 
do for character, for life, for civilization, and for 
humanity. 

If such words as these be credited by skepticism 
to a dogmatic spirit that takes everything for 
granted, then we have space to say only that 
many others, who were not in position to be re- 
garded as "counsel for the defense,^^ have been 
guilty of the same. Coleridge said, " The Church 
is the shrine of morality,^^ and the judgment of 
men is becoming clearer and stronger that moral- 
ity, minus Christ, is unworthy of the name. Mr. 
Froude, in his essay on " Cal vinism,^^ says : " Chris- 
tianity became the vitalizing spirit of a new organ- 
ization of society. All that we call modern civili- 
zation, in a sense which deserves the name, is the 
visible expression of the transforming power of the 
gospel.^' ^ 

The eloquent testimony of James Russell Lowell 
is too good to omit : " When the microscopic search 
of skepticism which has hunted the heavens and 
sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a 
Creator has turned its attention to human society, 

^ Short Studies of Great Subjects^ vol. ii., p. 45. Scrib- 
ners' ed. 



History 149 

and has found a place on this planet, ten miles 
square, where a decent man can live in decency, 
comfort, and security, supporting and educating 
his children, unspoiled and unpolluted ; a place 
where age is reverenced, infancy protected, man- 
hood respected, womanhood honored, and human 
life held in due regard — w^hen skeptics can find 
such a place, ten miles square, on this globe, wdiere 
the gospel of Christ has not gone and cleared the 
way, and laid the foundations, and made decency 
and security possible, it will then be in order for 
the skeptical literati to move thither and ventilate 
their views. But so long as these very men are 
dependent upon the very religion which they dis- 
card for every privilege they enjoy, they may well 
hesitate a little before they seek to rob the Chris- 
tian of his hope, and humanity of its faith in that 
Saviour w^ho alone has given to man that hope of 
life eternal wdiich makes life tolerable and society 
possible, and robs death of its terrors and the 
grave of its gloom /^ 

But someone wall be quick to exclaim that, if 
civilization is Christianity, then we abandon the 
very position for which we are arguing. But 
civilization is not Christianity. It is the effect, 
the product, the periphery, the hem of the gar- 
ment, of it. Not every civilized man is a Chris- 
tian, but ipso facto he is the subject of social and 



150 Christianity Supernatural 

moral and religious forces that are the product of 
Christianity and that have made him what he is. 
'^ A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump/^ Ten 
righteous men would have saved Sodom. Chris- 
tianity primarily is a thing of spirit, then of life; 
of heart, then of society. The core of the argu- 
ment which we are now urging is in the inmost 
heart of devout, godly, Christian men and women 
in the world. One John B. Gough, lifted from 
the gutter to Christian manhood, is an argument 
for Christianity that all the magazines of unbelief 
cannot overcome. A Jerry McAuley, a queen 
of Madagascar, a Narayin Shesbadri, these are the 
evidences breathing, testifying, living, working, 
speaking, dying, for Christ, which an astonislied 
world cannot gainsay or dispute. Plato said that 
ignorance is the curse of man, and that for him 
to know the riglit was to do it. The ages are 
against the opinion of Plato. The seventh chap- 
ter of Romans photographs the conflict in outline, 
not only in the believer's heart, but also in every 
man's who can ever say that, what he would, he 
does not, but what he hates, that he does. 

It is the distinguishing glory of Christianity 
that it furnishes such a man with the motive power 
to realize, in some measure at least, his noble as- 
pirations. The divine dynamic which it furnishes 
is the guarantee of the final victory. It is nowhere 
else to be found ; it is the deathless life of God ; 



History 151 

it is the new birth in the soul. " That which is 
born of the Spirit is spirit.^^ 

The only complete apologist is he who has this 
evidence within him. One man^s new heart is 
evidence " at second hand ^^ to his neighbor. The 
proofs of individual experience are good for their 
face vahie only to him who has possessed them. 
This is why the perfervid ^^ testimonies^^ that 
drown out the better devotional spirit of a certain 
type of present-day prayer meetings are subject to 
a liberal discount. Our neighbor's life may have 
apologetic value^ but his heart is hidden from our 
eyes. We judge that heart, if it is ours to judge 
at all, only by the life. 

The best evidence of the truth of Christianity 
is personal. Lazarus never doubted Christ's power 
to raise the dead after he Piimself had been raised 
at Bethany. The blind man declined to be drawn 
into the cavils and quibbles of the scribes and 
Pharisees, but only this he said, and he said it be- 
cause he knew it absolutely well : ^^ Whereas I was 
blind, now I see.'' It is said of John Newton that 
he was once asked whether or not he believed that 
the grace of God could convert the heathen to the 
Christian faith ; and his reply was this : ^' Since 
the grace of God has saved John Newton, I have 
never for a moment doubted its power to save any 
other living man." 



152 Christianity Supernatural 

The heart of man is the arena in which the 
signal triumphs of Christianity must ever be 
scored. The microcosm shall lead the macrocosm, 
and a society, a nation, a race, of newborn individ- 
ual men and w^omen, is the kingdom of heaven 
already come. 

Celsus was w^ont to mock the early Christians 
with the taunt, '' Only sinners become Christians," 
and the reply was convincing and complete : "Yes • 
because only Christ can turn sinners into saints." 
One Christian man proves Christianity true. The 
evidence from non-Christians is no evidence at all. 
Only the pure in heart shall see God. " The secret 
of the Lord is with them that fear him." Intel- 
lectual judgment upon the evidences of Christianity 
is blindness passing upon the beauties of a flower 
garden, it is a deaf ear pronouncing upon the 
sw^eet melodies of music. The brilliant satirist 
gave Christianity a hundred years to die; but the 
room in which he wrote its obituary became a 
Bible depot not long after he himself had died 
with a miserable groan on his lips. When Chris- 
tianity dies, the despair of death will fasten its 
horrors upon humanity's heart ; but because it 
lives and will live and gives life to all who will 
receive it, the inheritance of the race is holiness 
and hope and heaven. 



Soul is kindled by soul. To teach religion, the first thing 
needful, and also the last and the only thing, is the finding 
of a man who has religion. — Carlyle. 

There are only two sorts of men : the one, just, who be- 
lieve themselves sinners ; the other, sinners, who believe 
themselves just. — Pascal. 

Jesus is the highest of the pillars that show to man whence 
he comes and whither he ought to tend. In him is condensed 
all that is good and exalted in our nature. — Kenan. 

The Christ of the gospels is shown to be the center and 
strength of every argument for the truth of Christianity. 
The miracles of the Old Testament all lead up to him. The 
success of Christianity is due to him. Prophecy derives all 
its coherence and significance from him. The adaptation of 
Christianity is due to him. — Cairns. 

153 



CHAPTER XI 

CHRIST THE SUPREME EVIDENCE 

It is not necessary to produce evidence that 
there once lived in Syria a man whose name 
was Jesus. No one seriously doubts that. His 
earthly career is a fact. But talk as we may 
of ^^ naked facts/^ no fact is naked. It is related 
to other facts. It has its locus in the past. It 
is first an effect, and then a cause^ of other facts 
in the chain which the historian makes it liis task 
to trace. An isolated, solitary, disconnected fact 
would be utterly unintelligible. Hence it is that 
just so sure as the mind thinks, it endeayors, by 
dint of its very nature, to find an interpretation of 
every historical fact that it discovers. Facts are 
significant not in themselves, but because they are 
rich in results, because they are meaningful factors 
in the field of history. 

Preeminently is this true of Christianity. As 
Dr. Warfield, of Princeton, says: ^^ All its facts 
are doctrines, and all its doctrines are facts.'^^ 
There are many who dissent from this. They tell 

^ Presbyterian and Reformed Review^ July, 1896, p. 424. 

165 



156 Christianity Supernatural 

us that the idea is everything^ the fact nothing. 
It is not the truth, but truth, we should desire. 
Indeed, for truth to become fact in history would 
be to tarnish it and rob it of its lofty essence. 

*' What never and nowhere as fact did hold 
Is that alone which never can grow old." 

This Hegelian view of things takes slow hold 
upon the practical, matter-of-fact Saxon mind, and 
yet just now there is a sort of neo-Hegelian revi- 
val among thinkers who speak the English lan- 
guage. 

The true position is this, namely : that, with its 
pure ideals, Christianity presents facts in its history 
which prove those ideals both practicable and at- 
tainable ; and accordingly those facts are tortured 
and suppressed by any attempt to strip them of 
their appropriate rational and ethical significance. 

Given the fact of Jesus' life, to what rationale 
does that fact lead the inquiring mind ? What 
are the elements of that fact ? Was he like other 
men ? No two men are precisely alike. Was his 
difference one of degree, or was it one of kind ? 
Dr. BushnelFs celebrated chapter in his Na- 
ture and the Supernatural supports this thesis : 
'' The character of Jesus forbids his possible clas- 
sification with men.^^ If that be true, whatever 
forbids such classification is an implied element in 



Christ the Supreme Evidence 157 

the fact of Jesus' life. Tlmt fact includes his 
words, his deeds, his Spirit, his birth, his death, 
his teachings concerning himself, his explana- 
tions of any unusual power he possessed. The 
historical life of Jesus of Nazareth is a marvelously 
complex and composite fact, and to anyone who 
sincerely examines, analyzes, and explains, that fact, 
it will become apparent that there were involved 
therein certain forces and certain far-reaching truths 
that differentiate it from every other in all the tract 
of historic study. 

It is going too far to say that, as Louis remarked, 
^^L'etat c'est moi'^ — ^^ I am the State'' — so Jesus 
may say : '' I am Christianity." ^ But it is not 
going too far to say that the concrete fact of Jesus' 
life on the page of the history of mankind is the 
crowning evidence that Christianity is true. Start- 
ing with that conceded fact, it is utterly impossible 
to propose any credible explanation of it other 
than Christianity furnishes. As a matter of his- 
tory, no other explanation has ever been suggested 
which does not omit or obscure some of the ele- 
ments involved in the fact. We are not now 
arguing the historical trustworthiness of the gospel 
records ; we are taking that for granted, though by 
no means without ample warrant, and what we say 
is, that, with the plain, sober, prima facie, believ- 

^ See Watson's Mind of the Master, p. 188; also, Yan 
Dyke's The GosiJelfor an Age of Doubt, p. viii. 



158 Christianity Supernatural 

able narratives of the evangelists in our hands^ the 
world has never yet succeeded in bringing forth 
any rational explanation of the facts there recorded, 
which has at the same time kept those facts in 
mind and commanded the assent of skeptical 
spirits. The life of Jesus stands on the page of 
the past to confound utterly every doctrine that 
disowns him, every doubt that refuses to accept 
him. '' What shall we do with this man which 
is called Jesus ^ ^^ What think ye of Christ f^ 
These are questions which are still waiting for a 
clear and positive answer other than that he is 
indeed the Son of God. The Church may be in- 
vaded by weakness and unseemly strifes, but Christ 
is the evidence we are now presenting. The dia- 
lectical arguments of the schools may vanquish us 
by their bold brilliancy, and yet leave the heart 
loyal, after all ; but it is the living, breathing, 
loving Christ whose convincing evidence approaches 
the intellect through the warm and tender affections 
of the heart, of whom we now speak. 

The honest inquirer will never stop this side of 
some kind of explanation of that unique moral 
phenomenon, the life of Jesus. There is a kind 
of superficial reverence that would fain cover the 
Christ of the gospels with wreaths of compliment 
while refusing to look beneath the surface at the 
meaning of it all. Compare this Jesus with other 



Christ the Supreme Evidence 159 

men. You find at once that your comparison is a 
contrast. Look only at his spirit: simplicity, 
humility, gentleness, dignity, calmness, patience. 
His intellectual supremacy gives no hint of aca- 
demical pedantry or of studied precision. The sim- 
plest scenes of nature Avere the instruments in his 
hands of teaching sublimest moral truths. There 
is a sort of shock that evidences a subtle incon- 
gruity in the thought when men speak of the in- 
comparable parables, the peerless moral maxims, 
and the lofty ideals and incentives, which fell with- 
out effort from his lips, in the same way in which 
they speak of the philosophical treatises of a Plato, 
of the tragedies of a Shakespeare, or the poems of 
a Tennyson. The wonderful naturalness of it all 
shows that the mind has already placed the secret 
farther back — in himself. He was a great Teacher 
of moral truth, but the great Teacher makes him- 
self the unconscious illustration of his lesson. He 
was the divine Preacher of the truth, but the su- 
preme excellence of the Preacher is in the fact that 
his message and its Messenger are one. He was 
a man different from all others in this, that, while 
few have presumed to point to any blemish in his 
life, he quietly but absolutely refused to admit a 
single blemish there. The better human saints 
are, the more sensible are they of the few things 
in which they come short. This is the inexplica- 
ble fact concerning Jesus, that, if he was not sin- 



160 Christianity Supernatural 

less, he should have failed to confess his sins. 
More : this is the most inexplicable point of all, 
that, if he was not divine, he should allow the 
impression to go out that he was divine. When 
his followers so impressed the people that they 
fell down to do them homage, they exclaimed : 
"We also are men of lil^e passions with you,'^ 
"Stand up; I myself also am a man.'' How 
different the manner of Jesus challenging his 
critics : " Which of you convinceth me of sin ?'' 
calling to the multitude to come unto him and 
he will give them rest, and telling his disciples 
that he and the Father are one, for he was before 
Abraham was ! 

The puzzling question for doubt to answer arises 
in these words of Jesus concerning himself. If 
he was the best man that ever lived, and yet falsely 
said of himself that he was more than man, what 
shall we say ? Had he all the virtues of perfec- 
tion except that of modest truthfulness in speaking 
of himself? Can it be that he, who taught that 
repentance is the first step w^hich all men must take 
if they would enter into the kingdom of God, never 
repented of a single sin and studiously refrained 
from giving to the world any sign that he ever did 
repent? He taught that all men should confess 
their sins and be forgiven, but he also taught that 
he had no sins of his own to confess or to be for- 
given. This is the contradiction of contradictions. 



Christ the Sujyrcme Evidence 161 

for which there is no possible solution except in the 
fact tiiat Jesus was precisely what he gave out that 
he was^ and precisely what his followers have ever 
since believed, and to-day profoundly and rever- 
ently believe, that he was. The Latin proverb is 
not too strong, ''Aut Christus Deus aut homo non 
bonus est.^^ ^ 

Someone has said that the historic life of Jesus an- 
swers exactly to Plato^s picture of the perfect man, 
suffering for the sins of others, but having no sins 
of his own to suffer for. That life nineteen hun- 
dred years ago is the fulfillment of the prophecy 
which is uttered in every human heart. It is the 
real, answering to the souFs ideal. To have a soul 
is to be a prophet, for in every living soul w^ith 
conscience and guilt and ideals and aspirations, 
how^ever feeble, there is a picture of a character 
that is stainless, of a life that is pure. 

Tf Christ had never lived, the inborn expecta- 
tions of humanity w^ould have been forever disap- 
pointed. He is the cosmopolitan of the ages. 
He lived in Judaea and Galilee, and his life took 
on the coloring and complexion of its surround- 
ings. But he is at home in every age, he is a 
citizen of every country. Born on Asiatic soil, 
he is the founder and inspiration of a civilization 
that has scored its greatest achievements west of 

1 ^* Either Christ was God, or he was not a good man." 
11 



162 Christianity Supernatural 

Asia Minor^ and seems destined to go on until all 
the continents acknowledge its benignant sway. 
No man but sees in him his brother. His w^as 
the authority of the lawgiver coupled with the 
humility of him who keeps that law. He requires 
nothing which he is not willing himself to yield. 

* ' The Christ himself had been no lawgiver 
Unless he had given the life too with the law." 

His teachings need no revision to suit changes 
in social life or civil history. It would grate upon 
our ears to hear him called philosopher or scien- 
tist^ and yet there is a sublime philosophy in his 
teachings which is all the more impressive because 
it is hidden ; there is a science in his teachings 
which astonishes the proud achievements of mod- 
ern psychology^ and which needs no modification 
to suit the discoveries of modern research. Mr. 
Romanes points out what he regards as '^ one of the 
strongest pieces of objective evidence in favor of 
Christianity which is not sufficiently enforced by 
apologists." " It is the absence, from the biogra- 
phy of Christ, of any doctrines which the subse- 
quent growth of human knowledge — whether in 
natural science, ethics, political economy, or else- 
where — has had to discount.'^ ^ He then proceeds 
to quote these words from Mr. J. S. Mill : '' Not 
even now could it be easy, even for an unbeliever, 

1 Thoughts on Religion^ p. 167. 



Christ the Supreme Evidence 163 

to find "a better translation of the rule of virtue 
from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor 
so to live that Christ would approve our life/^ ^ 

This is significant testimony from witnesses none 
too willing. Let some man put forth a revised 
edition of the sermon on the mount, or of the thir- 
teenth chapter of St. Matthew, or of the fourteenth 
chapter of St. John, and the amused contempt of 
mankind would quickly show how infinitely beyond 
the ordinary utterances of ethical wisdom are the 
sublime deliverances of ^^ Him who spake as never 
man spake/^ 

It is said that, one day, as Lord Tennyson and a 
friend wxre sauntering along the Strand, in London^ 
they stopped to look at some pictures in a window. 
His friend knew the poet's partiality for Dante, and 
so he asked him what there was in Dante's face 
which was lacking in Goethe's. In a flash came the 
reply: ^^The divine." The heart of man in every 
age no sooner beholds the face of Jesus than it dis- 
cerns that which distinguishes it from every other, 
and, as it gazes into the depths of that soul-lit coun- 
tenance, it comes like an instinct to the beholder 
that what he sees is the face of the divine. The 
character of Jesus needs no argument or apology. 
It is its own evidence ; it is self-evidencing. 

That is a beautiful story which is told of Charles 

^ Three Essays on Theism^ p. 255. 



164 Christianity Supernatural 

Lamb^ who was once asked what he would do if 
some of the world's greatest men should suddenly 
enter his room. Shakespeare being named, he said : 
*^Ah, we should all rise and uncover/^ ^^And 
Christ?'^ With lowered tone, he reverently an- 
swered : ^' You see, we should all kneel/^ 

It is impossible to set forth the myriad-sided 
character of Jesus. In that marvelous piece of 
art, the Apollo Belvedere, its perfection consists 
not in its reproduction of any existing human fig- 
ure ; it is rather an unrealized combination of the 
physical perfections of the '^ human form divine/^ 
It is, in so far, ideal. It is an eclectic from a race 
of imperfections, in which the imperfect parts are 
eliminated and the perfections combined into tins 
classical triumph of the sculptor's art. 

Jesus Christ is more than the moral Apollo Bel- 
vedere of humanity. His character is not a mosaic 
of single human virtues. It is not a mechanism, 
but an organism. In him the ideal is realized 
without being in the least degree degraded by its 
medium or by its surroundings. In him the 
human is honored by its contact with the divine, 
while the divine is not dishonored by its contact 
with the human. The mind can create and cherish 
no loftier ideal of character, of life, of spirit, of 
service, of dignity, or of moral splendor, than that 
which was realized in him over eighteen hundred 



Christ the Supreme Evidence 165 

years ago. The cross on which he was crucified 
lias been raised by that one death into the symbol 
of all that is most hallowed to the human heart 
and most precious in the future of the race. His 
life was perfect, crowned by the glory of an unsel- 
fish Saviour's death. 

' ' Through all the depths of sin and loss, 
Drops the plummet of the cross ; 
Never yet ahyss was found 
Deeper than the cross could sound." 

The argument, in imperfect form and inadequate 
outline, is now presented. The limits set have al- 
ready been overpassed. The merit of the evidence 
presented will be variously judged by various 
judges. After all, speculative doubt is rather the 
symptom than the cause of disturbances of men's 
faith. There are certain antecedent moral condi- 
tions that are indispensable if we would believe. 
It is unfair and unjust to question the sincerity of 
all doubt, but, the doubter being witness, skepti- 
cism is certainly not always deep or thoughtful or 
very sincere. Marie Corelli tells us that she once 
asked an ardent Buddhist the reason w^hy he pre- 
ferred Buddhism to Christianity, and, after a little 
hesitation, the ardent Buddhist answered : '^ Oh, I 
don't know. Anything for a change !" ^ Such a 
flippant doubt could not be ascribed to David 

^ Romance of Tivo Worlds, p. 15. 



166 Christianity Supernatural 

Hume, one of the greatest of Scotch philosophers, 
and yet it is said of David Hume that, not long 
after the death of his mother, he spoke these words 
to his friend Boyle : ''' Ah, my friend, I throw out 
my speculations to entertain the learned and meta- 
physical world ; yet, in other things, I do not think 
so differently from the rest of the world as you 
imagine.'^ ^ More profoundly earnest still was the 
spirit of that brilliant scientist of modern England, 
whose untimely death the whole scholarly world was 
called upon to mourn, and who had made his way 
first to a state of reasoned skepticism, and then out 
of darkness into a new state of cautious but joy- 
ous trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. He says : '' In 
those days, I took it for granted that Christianity 
was played out !^' ^ How many there are who take 
it for granted that Christianity is ^^ played out'^ ! 
If only they had George John Romanes' diligent 
spirit, his scientific thirst for truth, his open-minded 
attitude toward all the evidence ! 

The truth of God is suited to the mind of man. 
Tertullian says that man is naturally Christian. 
If the doctrines of Christianity are untrue, the 
sanest moments of the soul are darkened with 
shadows and morbid fancies of its own creation. 
If historic Christianity is a falsehood, the forces 
of history have been in league with a lie. If Jesus 

^ See Harris's Self- Revelation of Qod^ p. 349. 
^ Thoughts on Religion^ p. 164. 



Christ the Supreme Evidence 167 

was either a deceived man or a deceiver^ then the 
canons of character are utterly destroyed : in the 
former case^ because the clearest intellect is lost in 
its own misty mazes; in the latter^ because the purest 
soul is hypocritically busied in painting black false- 
hood in the whiteness of the truth. 

The great Selden called transubstantiation rhet- 
oric turned into logic. Let us say that Christianity 
as a totality of which Christ is the foundation stone 
and topmost pinnacle, the origin and the ending, 
the Alpha and the Omega, with its divine forces, 
its divine works, its divine teachings, its divine 
calls, its divine promises, and its divine ideals, is 
nothing else than the supernatural, by divine grace, 
become Living Truth. 



THE END. 



NOV '6 1900 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIOr 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



i^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 653 768 6 



